As for the signal you have to know where to point your ANT to the OTA towers. Once you do that your all set.
For you, yes.
I'll suggest this, though. Consider your location and whether you have clear line of sight to the OTA towers. I suspect you do. From this, I'll guess that either you are in an area that is flat, or you are on a hill. In either case, I am willing to bet that your antenna has a virtually unobstructed view of all the towers. This makes your situation ideal.
I guarantee you, though, that if you were at the base of a hill and one of those towers was anywhere on the other side of that hill so that you did not have clear line of sight to the tower, you would get nothing from that tower no matter how far it is away from you. Does this make sense?
Consider, also, that if you were to research this more, there are some areas such as NYC where people do have clear line of sight to towers, but the signal is so strong that it overloads their tuners. They receive nothing as well. I wish OTA DTV was as simple as you state, however, in some cases, it gets very difficult. 8VSB modulation is the primary reason OTA DTV in the US absolutely sucks in some cases. For one thing, 8VSB is highly susceptible to multipath interference. What this is is when a tuner receives the same signal from multiple directions at the same time. A highly directional antenna can, in some instances, eliminate this, but the tuner also has a role.
In my valley, I do not have clear line of sight even to the local towers, and I suspect that the local OTA DTV signal I am able to receive is from reflected signal and not clear line of sight. I know where the stations are, and my antenna is on a rotator; it is a trivial matter for me to point the antenna at the stations. I've tried many times. The signal, if any, getting through from the various directions of the distant stations is not sufficient for my tuners to lock onto. If it were, I would be a happy camper like you.
Unobstructed view of the towers is the most important thing in OTA digital reception. Then comes the quality of the tuner. Anyone who has an unobstructed view of any OTA tower will get pristine reception from that tower, unless, perhaps, they are very close to the tower. In that case, the signal may overload the tuner and without an attenuator, they would also get nothing.
At certain times of the year, atmospheric bounce can allow reception of stations from OTA towers that are not in direct line of sight, but that only happens during part of the year. From what you describe, I highly doubt that this applies to your system.
As far as my amps go, I did not buy them at "The Shack." The antenna mounted one is an extremely low-noise Channel Master, and the distribution amp is an extremely low-noise Winegard. Both have noise figures less than 3db over their entire frequency range and they are some of the best amps, noise wise, on the market. Low-noise is important because if the noise level exceeds the signal level, then the tuner may not be able to pick the signal out from behind the noise.
I'll give the HDHomeRun boxes a closer look. Thanks for the suggestion. In my case, I'll be setting up MediaPortal which has a server mode and could also stream to any device in my network. HDHomeRun boxes are supported by MediaPortal.
I am interested in your pictures.