The installer was supposed to arrive "between 8am - noon" on Saturday. He called at 8:30 to say he'd be here "between 11:30 and 1:30". At 2:30, I called DirecTV to figure out what was going on. Finally, I got through to the installer. I was supposed to be job #2, but job #1 was a disaster, as it turned out he had to rip out and rewire an entire installation from scratch. We talked it over, and since my job was relatively simple, he agreed to drop what he was doing, come over and take care of me, and then get back to job #1 where his boss would be heading out to meet up with him and help him out. Would you believe he was originally assigned six jobs for 4 hours? Needless to say, he was way behind.

Changing out the old dish for the new 3-way dish and verifying that it worked took all of five minutes. No sweat. He agreed, for an additional $40, to install my OTA antenna. I assembled the thing (over six feet long by the time I was done), and it turned out that several of the bars were torqued pretty badly, but the majority of it looked to be in good shape. I had already chosen what looked to be the least distressed box at Fry's, so I figured I'd do best to just go with it.

I had bought a roof mount and a five foot pole, but the installer guy concluded he couldn't do what he wanted to do with the mount that I'd bought. Instead, he used a standard satellite elbow mount and attached the antenna to that. Then, I'd insisted that we get everything properly grounded. He was in a huge hurry to get done and overlooked a couple things, but everything got done right in the end when I pointed it all out to him. Both antennas and their cables are now properly grounded to a 10 or 12ga wire that connects to the metal case of my (outdoor) electrical junction box.

I don't have an HD tuner yet, but the difference with a standard tuner is night and day. Our bedroom TV, originally hooked to an indoor antenna, was iffy at best; channel 2, in particular, was just crap. Now, channel 2 is pretty good (minor ghosting) and channels 11 and 13 are sharp as a tack. The higher channels are all beautiful as well, which bodes well for my upcoming HD conversion (all but one of Houston's HD channels are in the UHF band).

Also, right now I'm using a passive 3-way splitter in the attic to route the antenna to the three taps in the house. I can always drop in an amplified splitter later if I figure out I need a stronger signal. I hope I don't need to go with one of the more exotic amplifiers that you mount on the antenna mast. (There's a run of maybe 20 feet of RG-6 cable from the antenna to the splitter, and then another 20-30 feet of whatever my house builder originally installed to get to each wall tap.)

The only issue, and it's a strange one, is that the DrecTV-TiVo I borrowed from Rob after my earlier one blew up, is now refusing to operate in dual-tuner mode. I spend some 90 minutes on the phone with the DirecTV people trying to debug that, to no avail. I started a thread on TivoCommunity that has kicked out some useful ideas for me to go try to narrow down the problem. I also called ValueElectronics, who are allegedly going to deliver my HD-Tivo by the end of the month to see if they could expedite things for me. They didn't make any guarantees but offered to do what they could for me. Hopefully, I'll get that issue straightened out soon.