OTA Connection on SWM-8

[Rojma]

I am in the process of closing on a house and am starting to plan out how I am going to have my DirecTV installation at the house. I am going to be setting up an off air antenna (I'm thinking the Antennas Direct DB8 with a Channel Master 7777) as a back up to DirecTV and so I can receive the various subchannels and PBS in HD.

I originally was thinking of running additional cabling in the house, but after some investigation, I determined that this plan may be too expensive, hard, and intrusive to do so. The house is a two story house and the wall I want to put the main TV at is in the first floor on a center wall. There is also no crawl space under the house.

In looking at my different options, I'm considering using the SWM-8 that has the OTA port and just use the existing cabling in the house. I have two questions:

1) How badly does the OTA signal degrade when using the SWM-8? One of the reasons I wanted to run separate coax cables was to maximize the signal strength of the off air antenna to increase reliability.

2) How does the signal get split out at the TV/receiver end? Does it use the normal older SAT diplexers or are there newer diplexers that are made for the SWM-8?

[William1]

1) Just as with any splitter, the SWM8 reduces signal strength (it has two outputs, acts like a two way splitter). Let's say instead you did run 2 seperate lines to two TV's, using a regular splitter. Signal stregth would be the samer as it would with the SWM8. Let's say you only had one TV. Instead of a full signal, you would only have one that ould be degraded about 4Db (typical splitter drop). If you need to add a splitter on because you have more than two feeds, hopefully, only one TV needs OTA. You can feed that TV directly from the SWM8 and then run the rest that do not need the OTA from the splitter. Make sense?

2) The diplexers used are nothing special with a SWM though use good ones. The installer will probably have them and will hook you up.

[carl6]

My personal experience with an SWM-8 is the ota signal is attenuated somewhat more than a simple split. I (and others) have had better success using external diplexers to mix ota, rather than using the internal swm-8 connection.

[dettxw]

My personal experience with an SWM-8 is the ota signal is attenuated somewhat more than a simple split. I (and others) have had better success using external diplexers to mix ota, rather than using the internal swm-8 connection.Yep, agreed.
I found that the VHF stations were attenuated significantly but the UHF stations were not as affected, still giving 100% but slower to get there.
Functional through the SWM, but I plan to put the external diplexers back in.

[BattleZone]

My personal experience with an SWM-8 is the ota signal is attenuated somewhat more than a simple split. I (and others) have had better success using external diplexers to mix ota, rather than using the internal swm-8 connection.

Agree. Using the SWM's internal diplexer drops signal strength around 10db, which is pretty significant. It may be necessary to use a pre-amp on the antenna, but that will depend on how strong the signal is to begin with. If you are close to your broadcast towers, you may have plenty of signal even going through the SWM.