Evening Gentlemen,
To give you some background on where I'm coming from I submit the following. After growing up doing electrical, framing, plumbing etc at my father's side, I worked for Time-Warner Cable as an in-house Installer and Service Tech for 5 yrs. I then realized doing belly crawls through blown in fiberglass insulation in the heat of a Florida summer, and gaffing poles in the rain, keeping an eye out for lightening strikes, wasn't what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life. Computers where a hobby of mine since my 1st AppleIIc+ clone made by Franklin. So with some fortuitous timing, I literally hung up my steel toed Redwings and Klein tool belt on a Friday and went to work Monday wearing a shirt and tie as a computer geek. That was 8 years ago. For the last 4.5 years I have been a computer network administrator where I help support, with assistance from a team of people, a home office, with over 400 servers and thousands of workstations, and branch offices located all over the U.S. This includes the building/wiring/maintaining and trouble-shooting all facets of the network and servers.
So now that you know my "non-pro" skill set, in the future I plan to put an addition on the house and remodel the existing structure. So, I'm thinking this would be a great time to start looking at a centralized communications/entertainment configuration. Since my budget doesn't afford the hiring of true pros, such as yourselves, I feel this is something I can do myself. I humbly ask the real pros their opinion on the best distribution panel/system brands for home use. This will be for Data/phone/video/sound for a 3 bedroom house. I've been doing some research both on foot and via Internet, but most "home" system's information available do not include the specs I need to make a really informed choice. Info not readily available are things like "DB loss per leg on that brand's 6 way coax splitter", quality of shielding etc. Since most of the consumer forums here at Remote Central are not quite knowledgeable enough for the kind of info I look for, I've spent a lot of time in your forum where the kind of information you guys banter around is invaluable to me. I wouldn't bother you guys if I could think of any place else to get the real scoop, not salesman drivel. I'm looking for opinions/recommendations of brands based on reliability, quality, upgrade-ability, ease of installation, price to performance etc. I've looked at brands like Leviton etc. I can't afford some of the more exotic brands I've seen you guys talk about. I just want to put in a solid foundation that can be expanded as needed without having to redo the whole thing later. I thank you all in advance for any input you may offer.

For starters, I would suggest going to signature wire and requesting info from them. They will assist you with your technical questions on wire specs.

http://www.signaturewire.com

Personally, I think all you need to do is mount a piece of plywood in your home run location and run all your wires to it, separating your video, phone, and network wires. You can buy video splitters, and 110 punch down blocks at Radio Shack or any electic supply store. You can get network routers and computer cards online from ecost, come to think of it you can get video splitters and punchdowns at partsexpress.com. The nice thing about plywood is that you can screw anything to it anywhere you want making configuration a snap. We do work for builders that always want us to cut our wiring prices, but they insist on spending hundreds extra on name brand panels. Don't sweat the dB thing unless you have a massive house with numerous drops. Just hook it up, if you have snow on all your tv's add an amplifier.

I have the option of using any part I choose, and I choose OnQ for "Structured" distribution panels, and most accessories. There are others w/ very good quality, Greyfox, USTech, and FutureSmart come to mind, but for the parts I need, OnQ has it. I use Channel Vision splitters, crack one open, you'll see why. Spaun multiswitches, best in the business. Channel Master and Blonder Tongue amplifiers, and Channel Plus modulators; Ditek, Panamax, and Surge-X suppresion. Cabling depends on the application, but the usual suspects are Belden, CommScope, Liberty Wireworks and Custom House Cable. Yes, I know I could get all of these items from one vendor, and it would be easier, but I find its worth the effort. I hate service calls.

jcmitch

I would only reiterate what jcmitch suggested:
OnQ
Belden
Channel Master
Channel Vision
Belden Cable (Good quality, good price)
Panamax SurgeProtection
Leviton makes alot of networking equip. that a person like yourself can pick up at home depot.

Remember One Thing: RUN ALL OF YOUR WIRES IN HOME RUNS AND LABEL THEM. YOU WON'T REMEMBER WHAT IS WHAT WHEN THE TIME COMES.
Another suggestion if you cant run all the wire now. install a piece of 2" PVC from attic to basement.

Thanks for the info guys. It's just what I was looking for.

If you are still around... definattely go with a structred wiring panel. Leviton makes good ones that you can get at your local electrical supply house. Also ask them for some "How TO" brochures.

Be thinking about where your computer(s) are going to be and whether you want several computers to share one printer and or you high speed interent modem(dsl, sat internet.)

What about audio? Will you have surround sound? What about distruted audio. That's going to be separate from the phone, data and coax.