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Here's an update for anyone interested. I finally had a chance to mess around with the antenna situation over the weekend. The local Fry's hadn't restocked their antenna inventory since my last post so there wasn't anything readily available to me. However, I did find the HDTV antenna plans posted by Make Magazine. I had the scrap parts in my garage and clothes hangers in the closet so I thought it wouldn't hurt to give it a try. Much to my surprise, that antenna worked really well. So I learned a few things from this experiment.
First, the DIY antenna looks totally ghetto and sinister. But it seems to work just as well as the ClearStream 2. Swapping out two out, I the DIY antenna got all the same channels as the C2. So the first lesson is that I wasted $100 on the C2. Anyway, I placed the DIY antenna at a different part of the house so I got channels that the C2 wasn't getting, including the troublesome KABC.
Second, I didn't have a combiner offhand so I used a splitter (in reverse). That didn't work at all. I thought it would just provide a simple electrical connection but there must be some addition circuitry inside the splitter. Instead, I spliced together several coax cables and ran both antenna feeds into the input of the distribution box.
Third, having two different antennas on the same coax input feed does cause some interference with the signals. But that's not surprising since the problem has been pointed out a number of times on this forum. In my case, when both antennas are connected, several channels were lost (they were all spanish stations so I didn't care). On the flip side, I'm getting more channels I like. So it's working out for me.
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