Whole-House Indoor TV Antenna

I cut the cable cord about 3 weeks ago now, and I wanted to get rid of the TV antenna hanging on my living room wall and also the one hanging on my bedroom wall.

I bought a Mohu Leaf Paper-Thin Indoor HDTV Antenna and it has worked great for me in my particular location -- I receive about 40 TV stations for free over the air.  But I only had it connected to one TV - in the living room - and I wanted to connect it to all of my TVs using my existing home wiring.  Here's how I did it:

I still receive internet from my cable TV provider, so I couldn't simply plug the antenna into a cable jack and share the signal through the house - the internet signal was already doing that.  So I dug around in the basement and found where the cable wire comes into the house and where it is split to serve each of my rooms.

The process was simple, but took a little time.  There was a splitter for the incoming service to each of the rooms in my home, but the splits were not marked.  I simply disconnected each split, one at a time, to isolate the room where I have my cable modem and wireless router set up (in a spare bedroom, tucked under a dresser.)  I disconnected the cable internet source from the splitter and directly connected it via a simple female-to-female coupler to the coaxial cable which runs to the room with my cable modem and wireless router -- now the internet signal only runs to the room with my cable modem -- the rest of the house is separated.

Mohu Leaf Antenna on spare bedroom wall.

I located the indoor antenna in my other spare bedroom, on a wall facing in the optimum direction for the stations I can receive.  This room is rarely used so I'll hardly ever see the antenna.  I went back down into the basement and, by trial and error, determined which cable serves that room.  I inserted the right cable into the "in" jack of the existing splitter and voila!  All of the cable jacks in my home (except for the one serving my internet connection) are now connected to my antenna!

Mohu Jolt Amplifier installed between cord from antenna
(white) and the wall socket used to send antenna signal
through the entire house.

The downside to connecting my antenna to all of the wiring in the house is signal loss, also called attenuation.  I found that I lost 5 channels with this set-up.  I solved this problem, however, by using an amplifier between my unpowered antenna and the wall outlet.  In my case I used the Mohu Jolt HDTV Antenna Amplifier , which provides 15db of gain.  This was enough to restore the 5 channels I had lost due to attenuation.  Some iffy channels even came in better.

I had looked online before figuring out this method for sharing an indoor antenna with existing house wiring, but the solutions I found were more complicated or required additional equipment or wiring.  The downside to my method is that I can't hook up a TV to the shared antenna in the room that has my cable modem and wireless router, but I think that's a minor issue since I located the modem in a room that's seldom used.

A workaround could be to locate the cable modem and wireless router in the basement, directly next to the incoming cable wire, so that I can restore TV antenna service to that bedroom -- the downside would be a weaker signal from the wireless router to my internet devices upstairs.

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