OTA Signal Distribution for Communities

Introduction 

The facility described in this blog is a former hotel in Longmont, Colorado. It was converted into affordable housing by the Longmont Housing Authority. LHA installed the City of Longmont’s NextLight Fiber instead of Comcast’s Xfinity broadband. This allowed the installer, StreamWise Solutions, to use the existing coax lines for OTA antenna signal distribution. The City of Longmont had been paying Xfinity about $50 per unit for 130 units. Switching to NextLight Fiber and free-to-air broadcast TV resulted in a net annual saving of over $50,000.

This blog describes how StreamWise installed two antennas and distributed the OTA signals to all 130 units in the building. It addresses issues like how do large installation like 55+ communities, hotels and multi-dwelling units (MDUs) cope with distributing Over-The-Air (OTA) signals from one or more TV antennas to hundreds of rooms? How are signals from multiple antennas combined to receive stations broadcasting from different directions or on different RF bands like low-VHF, High-VHF, and UHF? These solutions that apply to MDUs also work for single-family homes.

The real problem being solved here is that an antenna typically receives a mixture of strong and weak signals. The worst thing one can do is use a cheap amplifier that amplifies everything by 15 or 30dBm. That overamplifies strong signals and adds unnecessary noise.

The next best thing is to use an amplifier like this single input or this dual input model from Televes that can combine two antenna inputs. These amplifiers use three different amplifiers for low-VHF, high-VHF and UHF bands and do not overamplify any one RF band. This is still a bit of a compromise because the strongest station limits how much the weakest station can be amplified.

The real solution is presented by a pair of Televes products that contain 32 discreet amplifiers that allow you to individually adjust the amplification for up to 32 stations. These products are called the SmartKom and the Avant X. The former is suitable for single family homes and medium size MDUs and the latter is for large MDUs.

The Installation 

Let’s see how this was done for this particular installation. The install starts with the Antennas. These are tri-band Televes antennas with built-in preamplifiers and LTE filters. Each antenna costs around $200 and is available at https://amzn.to/40R0YUb. Since the antenna has its own built in amplifier the SmartKom and the Avant X can supply power to the antenna or turn that power off using the accompanying setup app. In the photo below, two antennas are used to receive signals from two different directions, and the signals are combined using the Avant X distribution amplifier. 

In the following photo, you can see the antennas on the roof of the facility. 

The antennas feed into a $400 Televes Avant X distribution amplifier, shown below. You can find the Avant X at https://amzn.to/4rJ8bk5. 

Now comes the important part: 

1. Ensure that each unused RF output or input is terminated with a 75-ohm RF terminator, as shown in https://amzn.to/4dCAXPY. This keeps all output equally load-balanced, prevents noise interference, and keeps dust out of the RF connectors. 

2. The grounding blocks are not shown. Be sure to ground each RF output coming from each antenna with a grounding block like the one shown at https://amzn.to/4stCz3e. 

3. The Avant X is combining RF inputs from the two antennas and feeding them into a 4-way splitter. You can easily use an 8-way or a 16-way splitter. Just terminate each unused output. 

4. Use a balanced network so that each end point has the same number of splits. This is important because when you change the amplification for a station the same level will feed to all end points. If one end point has a single split and another has a 16-way split the signal received at each end point will be vastly different and defeat the main purpose of this whole exercise. 

Finally, the receivers. You can drive ZapperBox quad, dual or single tuner receivers with such a system. Since a quad tuner will internally split the signal twice, each tuner will lose about 8dBm. However, we test each unit to operate between -86dBm and +6dBm. This allows for a very wide sweet spot to set the optimum amplification.