[Pete Higgins]

toadcat,

I’ve had cable for the last 32 years, so “playing” with TV antennas has become more of a hobby than a necessity. I tried using an 8-Bay Bow Tie with movable panels to receive stations from two different markets (~123 deg. apart) and had very poor results (my signals are even weaker than yours, so I lost almost everything).

A gentleman on this forum (tripelo) explained that when the panels aren’t aligned in the same plain with both panels’ signals arriving on the same channel(s) in phase and adding in the combiner, the signals on one panel see the other panel and ~½ of the signal is reradiated by the different panel. To prevent this he recommended “isolating” one panel from the other using pre-amps, exactly what ADTech recommended. He recommended using “matched” preamps which I didn’t have so I kind of winged it with what I had and it made all the difference in the world.

A single 4-Bay in each direction didn’t provide enough signal strength at my location so I applied the same logic to two 8-Bays with much better results. I also added a VHF High antenna to receive VHF signals from one market.

Here is a link to a power passing combiner that will pass power to two amplifiers isolating two panels or two separate UHF antennas; http://www.solidsignal.com/pview.asp...ce=google_base

Here is a link to a whole series of posts on the experiments I recently ran with pictorials of my working design (post # 40); http://forum.tvfool.com/showthread.php?t=2288

If you truly want to feed up to 8 different sets I would recommend an amplified 8-Way splitter like the PCT MA2 -8P; http://www.solidsignal.com/pview.asp...er-(pct-ma2-8p)

I assume a rotor to turn your antennas isn’t practical because people in different parts of the house are going to want to watch channels arriving from different directions?