[tluxon]

Well, I decided to go up on the roof and point the antenna's bowties straight at those huge maple trees to the SSW. I definitely saw a slight drop in signal strength, but the signal quality improved by about 4-5 points on the problematic channel and only dropped by 0-5 points on the other channels, leaving them still all in the 90's.

While up there, I saw I was only using about 40 of the 50 foot cable running down from the antenna and over and into the house. I had coiled and twisty-tied the excess cable, and right away suspected that to be a potential problem. At the time I didn't have a tool for customizing the length of the cable and elected to keep it all intact. I'll have to figure out the best way to deal with that because neither end of the cable is as simple to access as I'd like.

As for the amp, I actually used the signal straight from the antenna split three ways (2 TiVoHDs and a PC tuner) for many years before adding 2 HDHomerun Duals and a third TiVo (Premier). Two of these were another 50 feet from the antenna's 50-foot cable, and the extra splits and several runs total of 50 feet or so were just a little too much for the signal at the ends.

We do have a sunroom that provides a clearer view of the towers I'm trying to get, but the chimney was already there as a sturdy vertical support and permitted me to use twelve feet of mast to get the antenna nice and high. Attaching to the roof of the sunroom with a comparatively small base seemed like would lose a lot of leverage for that length of mast and I figured I might lose so 6-10 feet of elevation moving over there. I think I'll get one of my boys to help me hand-hold it in other prospective areas to see if there's a better one that's fairly simple to adequately mount to.

Thanks for the great suggestions!