Will my OTA singal be too strong?

[matt91]

We moved a couple of months ago, and I haven't yet got around to mounting my [Squareshooter UHF-Only] OTA antenna. The antenna has a small powered amp, but I never used it, and it seemed to work fine just running the coax to my HD HomeRun.

The new house is very close to the Washington, DC, towers for the major networks; the TVFOOL report is here. I plan to aim the antenna at roughly 280 magnetic to split the difference between the 270, 280 and 290 towers (I'm only interested in the NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox/PBS channels).

Since the farthest antenna is 3 miles away, and I'll have a direct line of sight to it from my roof, might I have issues with "too much signal"? I'm not really sure what these issues would be, or if 1 to 3 miles from the towers puts me in that zone, but I thought I'd ask since I've seen a couple of references to this on here in the past.

I would probably run coax 20-30 feet from the antenna to my HDHR. There would be a single 1:2 splitter at the terminal right before the HDHR.

Thanks for any thoughts.
Matt

[pjpjpjpj]

You'd probably only need rabbit ears indoors. You could probably set the HDHR next to your router/switch and set rabbit ears on top of it and get everything. If you definitely want the antenna out of the way, if you have an attic, you could almost certainly put the antenna in the attic (saves you grounding issues and also weather issues, corrosion, etc.).

I'm sure you'll get 20 different answers here, but as any antenna junkie will tell you, it's a "magic" science, and there are so many factors at play that the only way to really know is to try it and see. But if you don't NEED it outdoors (don't know why you would, but you never know), I'm sure you'll be fine with it indoors. Unless you have, you know, lead-lined walls or something.

And you certainly won't need that amp....

[matt91]

I hadn't thought of mounting it in the attic, but it makes sense. maybe i'll give that a go first and see what happens.

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by matt91

I hadn't thought of mounting it in the attic, but it makes sense. maybe i'll give that a go first and see what happens.

I have my antennas in the attic and HDHRs in a second-floor hall linen closet on a high shelf that I put in just for them. That way my coax run was only about 10 feet. But you probably don't need to worry about coax losses, you'll have more worries about too much signal.

BTW, I have two antennas because I get signals from one city with towers 14 miles away, and another in the complete opposite direction that is about 45 miles away. And I get them both perfectly from my attic. So you shouldn't have any problems at all.