Excellent questions. I should have thought of hooking straight up to the antenna. It did cross my mind, but I forgot I had a small Vizio I could bring up instead of running a long line to my wall mounted TV. I used the short leads that currently connect the antenna to the preamp.
One of the splices is to go through a panel, and the other is a wall faceplate. I could probably work around the faceplate one, but there's no way I'm getting another run down from that attic. On that note, it was a real bear getting that antenna installed up there, only 2.5' to work in, blown insulation, the stuff of my nightmares. I think I could work something out with the wiring if I had a solution to what I found below with just the antennas.
The test results closely mirror my anecdotal report. I think I had been getting a few lower channels through the FM antenna before I removed it. I'll put the grid in a code block so it stays in correct columns. The Vizio would report signal strength as a series of up to 8 dots, I listed the number of reported dots for each of the antennas:
Code:
RF Chan UHF VHF
11 11.1 X 4
9 9.1 6 X
40 41.1 2 X
45 5.2 7 7
35 5.1 7 7
34 2.1 2 4
23 2.3 6 5.5
32 4.1 6 7
29 29.1 7 7
22 23.1 7 7
43 43.1 2 3
Channels AntennaWeb says I should get but don't care about
16 16.1 6 3
25 25.1 1 X
Other channels I found
62.1 3 2
33.1 3
48.1 1
50.1 1 1(blocky)
If the VHF could pick up RF9, I think I would be in good shape. It seems odd to me that the UHF can pick it up so well, and RF34 as well.