Combine analog and digital

[TPK]

My family has a house in Chicago…  Their house is nicely wired and they have a bunch of televisions (mostly old TVs with some newer ones thrown in)…  They just ditched Comcast cable and went with U-verse the other day…  Of course now they have the issue where they used to have several TVs hooked up directly to cable, and now they are forced to use a box to receive television…  They certainly aren’t interested in renting a bunch of boxes (at $7.50 each per month) for each TV in the house, so I was trying to think of a solution to get TV reception to all the other TVs in the house…

The nice thing about the house is, that mostly all the rooms are wired (both with coax and cat-5) to a central location in the basement..  Naturally the u-verse RG was installed in the basement, and all the rooms can be reached throughout the house from that location..  They have only one box (for now) and that’s hooked up to the HD television they have in their main living room…  Anyhow, I can see two possible solutions for hooking up the TVs without having to rent a bunch of boxes..

One solution would be to put an antenna on the roof, wire it down to the basement, and then distribute the antenna signal to the other rooms in the house…  This way, they can get digital OTA TV on any TV equipped with a digital tuner, and I suppose they can buy an OTA tuner box for those TVs that don’t have a digital tuner built in..  They won’t get the U-verse channels, but at least all the other TVs will be usable this way..

Another solution would be to rent one additional U-verse box, hook it into the RG, and then take the RF channel 3 output from the box, and just distribute it from there to the other TVs in the house…  Then I suppose they could get a bunch of IR<->RF transceivers (I’ve used ‘powermids’ in the past) so they can control that box from anywhere (or is there another way to get IR control back to the box, perhaps back through the coax?)…  This way, they can get any u-verse channel anywhere in the house…  Granted it would only be in standard definition with monaural sound, and all the other TVs in the house would have to be on the same channel, but at least the other TVs in the house would be usable this way…

Or, perhaps a third solution would be to have the best of both, and distribute both the digital antenna, along with the analog channel 3 from a u-verse box, on the same coax, throughout the house…  TVs can then be set up to tune to the digital channels, or to analog channel 3, and they would be able to switch from one to the other at will..

Is it possible to combine the digital and the analog..   Is that just as easy as taking a splitter and reversing it, to combine two coax cables into a single cable??   Or do I need some sort of equipment (like a ‘combiner’) to do that??   What would be the best way to do it??

[TPK]

To sorta halfway answer my own question, I found this unit (Channel plus 3025) that will modulate the output from a set top box and distribute it to (at least) 4 TVs, and combine that with an antenna input...  And it looks like it can handle IR control functions via the coax as well...

The only thing is, I am not sure if it will work in the new era of OTA digital broadcast TV, or if it would only work with an antenna during the analog broadcast TV era...

Has anyone used one of these successfully in the way I have described (to combine the output of a STB with an antenna so the TVs can have the option to tune to the STB, or to digital OTA, over a single coax)...

Found it here:

http://www.smarthome.com/7717/Channel-Plus-Multi-Room-Video-Distribution-System-3025/p.aspx

Priced lower here:

http://www.buy.com/prod/channel-plus-3025-whole-house-distribution-center/q/loc/111/90098830.html

... Is there another unit I should be getting, that will provide sort of the same functionality but with compatibilty for newer technology (like digital OTA broadcasts)...