Hi Rick,
Good to see you are making progress.
Teleview's suggestion of testing the reception/dialing it in with a single coax run into one TV is best. One single run - no splitters, amplifiers, preamps etc. - from the antenna to TV is what you want to do. This establishes a baseline for system performance.
This also gives you a clear indicator as you start splitting and adding things, you can identify what step is causing problems.
With a 3 splits going on, in this configuration I may purchase a channel master 3414 4-way distribution amp and yank the verizon splitter, just to try to offset the signal losses created in the signal split.
http://www.amazon.com/Channel-Master.../dp/B001PI09SE
Keep us up to date!