Hello and welcome!
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Originally Posted by piperpilot12w
Is it possible to attach the coax, from a roof top antenna, to the point where the cable company signal attaches in the house utility compartment (part of the house) and use the existing cable run throughout the house?
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Yes, it should work. However, in many cases, the cable company box is locked and you might not be able to access the coax to connect into it.
As an alternative, you might want to find the distribution point where the signal gets split to all your different rooms. If you run your antenna feed to that point, you can use it as the input to the splitter instead of the cable company's feed.
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Would I get a decent signal?
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Based on your tvfool report, you are getting a bit of terrain shadowing ("2Edge" diffraction), but you are still getting a very usable amount of signal. You should be able to get most of the channels in the yellow and pink rows with a decent antenna.
That varies with the channel and the time of day. Most of the major network channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS, etc.) air a fair amount of HD programming during prime time (especially news, sporting events, and popular new shows). At other times of the day, and with other kinds of programming, it can vary.
When you do get shows in HD, most people rate the quality to be slightly better than the HD content offered by cable and satellite companies. That is because the cable and satellite companies need to squeeze hundreds of channels into a limited pipe. They must resort to more agressive video compression settings to achieve this. This too can vary from channel to channel and from one program to the next, but you'll have to decide for yourself.
What you will NOT get from OTA TV are the cable-netowork channels (e.g., Discovery, ESPN, CNN, Food Network, HBO, etc.). You'll have to decide if you are willing to give up these channels.
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There are 5 televisions in the house
The only channels that are needed would be
KCBS 43
KNBC 36
KTLA 31
KABC 7
KCAL 9
KTTV 11
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You should be able to get all these channels and more. Most of the Mount Wilson channels reach you at about the same signal strength, so if you get these channels, you'll probably get just about all of them.
For optimum reception, I would recommend a Winegard HD7697P antenna on the roof with a mast-mounted pre-amp (good ones include the Channel Master 7777, Winegard 8275, , or Antennacraft 10G202).
Mast mounted pre-amps come in two parts. There's the amp itself that gets installed close to the antenna, and there's also a power supply unit. Power is fed to the amp directly through the coax, so the amp can sit outside while the power injector sits inside.
It would be best if you could connect your antenna feed at the distribution splitter rather than at the outdoor cable company box because it would be more convenient to install the pre-amp's power injector there.
Use RG6 coax to connect everything.
This setup will give you good antenna sensitivity for all your local channels. The pre-amp will boost the signal at the optimum point in your system (right after the antenna) and help overcome the signal loss that occurs with splitters and long cable runs.
The antenna needs to be on the roof, pointed at Mount Wilson (compass heading of 324 degrees). A 5 to 10 foot mast can be used to hold the antenna up off the roof. A chimney mount, eave mount, or tripod can be used to hold the mast.
