The fact that you are trying to receive out-of-market channels will not make your in-market channels magically disappear.

You appear to be trying to bargain with members of this forum to allow you to receive additional channels with your preamp. No one here has any control over your preamp. Your preamp's effectiveness is determined by its specifications and the aggregated strengths of the signals that it receives.

I'm betting dollars to donuts that you received 20 extra sub-channels on many fewer unique RF channels. For a given RF channel, if you receive one of its sub-channels, then you will receive all of its sub-channels.

Did I say it would? I was saying that even though I aimed it in another direction they still come in just fine and while it's aimed in another direction the pre-amp appears to help. Like I said earlier, it didn't really help get me a lot more channels however it did fix the little studders I had with my local Fox station.

How so? I'm just trying to learn more about it (in this case the pre-amp) and I've shared my experiences with it. I'm not asking for channels here, how could I? I know it's not even really possible without a larger antenna at a higher height.

Obviously, I take it you just assume that by the fact that I named every channel (excluding sub-channels unless it was another major network). Take the Dayton PBS for example, that 5 channels right there.

You've got it right, the key to reliable reception is primarily, antenna selection and it's location.

A preamp will help when you are faced with a long run of coax, splitter loss and poor tuner noise figure.

Amplifiers do not improve the performance of the antenna.

Some preamps are designed to work well with a mix of weak and moderate strength signals. A few preamps are able to work well in the presence of fairly strong signals. The AP8275 is intended for use where no strong signals are present.

If you installed a higher gain antenna and aimed it at the Toledo stations, I would expect the AP8275 to have trouble. I would expect it to act as an RF mixer, generating sum and difference products of the various signals arriving at the input. The output would be a combination of the original signals plus many interfering signals produced inside the preamp, the by-products of overloading the amplifier.

A high gain antenna (8-bay panel or DXing Yagi) aimed at Fort Wayne equipped with a Winegard HDP-269 or Antennas Direct CPA-19 would be far less inclined to overload if it was turned toward Toledo.

I'm only using one splitter to two upstairs tvs.

Initially I thought distributors were used for distributing the signal. I guess if the 8275 was supposed to be used when only a low signal is present it COULD help if I was aiming for distant stations but I guess I'm not close enough/my antenna is not good enough to even pick up a weak signal.

Oh well, I know now. I bought the 8275 because I though it would help with weak signals from other cities, for all I know it does but only at night. The 8275 was also cheaper than the 8700. I guess the worse case scenario is I get all my Toledo stations, which I do so no big deal.