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The sporadic dropouts are unlikely to be caused by your cabling. Anything that your cables/couplers do to the system is going to remain static as opposed to something that varies so rapidly.
I suspect that the problem is more likely to be related to the way your antenna is pulling in signals from the environment. I believe that you said your antenna is pointed directly at KDKA (138ยบ). This means that channel 41 is coming in through the "back" side of the antenna, a little off center, but in part of the antenna's radiation pattern that has low gain.
Also keep in mind that TV signals can bounce around the environment (off buildings, terrain, trees, etc.). Your antenna is probably picking up a combination of the "strong" signal entering the "weak" side of the antenna plus a mix of randomly reflected signals that are entering the "front" of the antenna. This combination of signals (direct and reflected) can look like multiple overlapping echoes of the same signal to your receiver. This is also known as multipath. When the multipath corruption of a signal gets bad enough, the channel can no longer be decoded and you can end up with channel dropouts.
One way to fix this is to re-point your antenna. This will change the relative strength of the "echoes" contributing to multipath. As you turn the antenna, some of the signal paths will become stronger while others become weaker. With an antenna rotator, you would be able to slowly change the direction of the antenna until you find a spot that has minimal problems with channel dropouts. It's a lot more work without an antenna rotator, and the optimum position might change as the weather, seasons, and tree leaf density changes throughout the year (and change the amount of reflected signal hitting your antenna from various angles).
Your older antenna might have behaved differently because the hot and cold spots in the antenna's radiation pattern are in different places for each antenna.
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