Thanks Tower guy for all the good information and suggestions,
I got lucky and finally found detailed information on the CM-5020 antenna. Gains for VHF lo, hi and UHF are 4.5, 10 and 16 dBi (so ~2.4, 7.8 and 13.8 dB respectively). The 15-20 dB most sites were listing is the front to back ratio. At 109 inches long, it should work physically for me.
I am going to give it a try in the attic for grins to see what I can get. Back in the day (2003), we got just one channel with a tv top VHF/UHF antenna (Fox, ch 5), so there is some hope.
Cabling Question
Currently, I am remodeling the second floor, which is the main floor. I have a lot of walls open so it is a great time to run the RG6 through out the house. We cut the cable a year ago, but the existing commercial cable line is still in place - running along the outside of the house and along the walls inside the house. In other words just ugly. It also only goes to one location, the family room. The cable comes to the house on the east gable side. My tv antenna comes into the attic from the west gable end.
I think I see two ways to go with this. One is to run a "home run" from the commercial cable point of entry to the attic and leave it unattached in the event a future home owner wants commercial cable. The commercial cable could then be swapped for the OTA lead to the four way splitter.
The second approach would to run a separate commercial cable network and use duplex Jack F type wall plate connectors (
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073YDQGW9...v_ov_lig_dp_it) and label the outputs (OTA and commercial cable) on the wall plates. What I don't know about this approach is that we only ever had one tv with one box/dvr. I am not sure how multi-room tvs and dvrs that I see advertised works cable layout wise. Currently, there is a splitter on the commercial cable at the tv location which the tech added to reduce signal strength. I would think I would put a four way splitter where the commercial cable first comes into the house (it is a convenient location) and run RG6 from there to the target locations. A second option would be run the cable to the family room tv and initiate the other cables from that location.
All of these options are equally feasible physically at this time, but not for much longer. I passed my plumbing, electrical rough in and framing inspections this week. Yay
Recommendations? Is there a how to somewhere on the Internet? Call it a day with the OTA antenna and leave it at that?
Thanks for your time! (and my apologies for the wordiness).
Parke