Newbie question regarding OTA signal (1 Viewer)

[marathon]

This is my first post; I signed up about a month ago while researching a new TV purchase, and have gotten a lot of good advice as a lurker. I couldn’t find the answer I’m looking for here, so I apologize if it’s been discussed before.

Okay, here’s my situation. I just bought a new TV (Toshiba 62HM196), and want to hook up an OTA antenna to get the local (Pittsburgh) HD stations. The TV is in the basement, which was finished by the previous owner, with one cable run from the entry point (in the unfinished portion) to the TV location, for the DirecTV. I am not looking forward to attempting to run another cable to the TV for the antenna through the finished ceiling, across two rooms. One of the on-line tutorials I came across shows the use of a diplexer to combine the antenna and DirecTV cables, and then another diplexer to split the signals, to send them into the satellite receiver and TV. Is this an acceptable method? Does the HD signal suffer any degradation from being combined and then split? Also, if this is an acceptable method, is there anything in particular I need to be sure to get in a diplexer, or are they all the same?

Thanks in advance!

 

[bgheadrick]

If you diplex an off air signal with a Directv signal it will not degrade the quality. I have done this many times on installations and never had any problems, ironically I have done this in the Pittsburgh area as well.

 

[Robert_J]

Diplexing is fine as long as you are just receiving the MPEG2 satellite signals. If you ever decide to upgrade to the AT-9 or AU-9 dish and receive MPEG-4 HD satellite channels, you will have to remove your diplexers and run another cable directly from the antenna. On the other hand, if you did upgrade, then you are probably receiving your local HD channels via satellite anyway.

-Robert

 

[marathon]

Thanks for the responses.

Robert, I'm not currently getting DirecTV HD, and don't have any plans to in the immediate future, as Pittsburgh has a pretty good selection of OTA HD. The only one I wish I could get from the DirecTV selection is ESPN, but I'll try to struggle on for a while without it.