Hi All,

I work for a hotel and we wanted to provide over the air HDTV with the other cable channels. The current channels come through Direct TV and each channel is set up on a different box and then integrated into one line. So there are about 35 direct TV boxes in a room and each one is set to a different frequency. This is then broadcast to each tv in the hotel. The 32 inch vizio TV's are set up in cable mode and recieve all the channels. I was wondering if there was any way to use an Antenna to catch over the air broadcasts and integrate them into the same line as the other channels and have them work on CABLE mode on the Tv. I used the antenna on one of the TV's and it gets the DTV channels in antenna mode, but not in cable mode. Another option would be to broadcast the current channels in such a way that the tv's recieves them in antenna mode. If anyone knows how to do this/ If this is possible at all I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance,
Kathan

Yes you can.

You can do it two ways.

If your main DirecTV box is an HD box then it should also have a coax input for what is normally called in the business, an off air antenna.

Get yourself a nice Terk rooftop radial antenna and feed that line down to your DirecTV box and plug it in. Then you will need to set up the DirecTV box to look for both the satellite signals and the digital signals from the off air antenna. Those digital off air signals will be mixed right in with the rest of the DirecTV channel line up and also then made available to which ever rooms want to watch them.

The other way is to split the off air antennas line and feed it to every room in the hotel and use diplexers to mix the satellite and off air antenna signals. However this way presents more problems as splitting the off air antennas line to many times will lead to weaker signals which will then require line amplifiers to boost the signals. Line amplifiers are expensive and can also add more line noise then they actually get rid of. Also you will need to purchase all the cable to run to the rooms, add in more jacks, and purchase all the diplexers for each room. So I would highly recommend using the first method.