Careful with cheap cable, you want foam filled cable preferably CAI approved (Confederation of Aerial Industries). Cheaper air filled cable lets water run down inside it, right into your television if it gets damaged or there's a bad join. For what it costs, and for how often you do it, its well worth paying a little bit extra for decent cable. Cheaper cable normally isn't as well shielded so can let unwanted signals into it. We only use WF100, and we use about 1 km most weeks. (We sell it at 70p per metre so its not really that expensive anyway).
As for splitting the signal, it really depends on the signal strength to begin with, a passive splitter has about 3-4db insertion loss so if the signal strength is good (say above 60db) then just use one of them. If not then you can use a two output masthead amplifier and have two cables from the aerial and a power supply on one of the legs, or if you have a sky box in the main room, just plug the aerial into that then use the RF2 output to another room (bonus with this is that the sky will be combined with the Freeview so you will have an analogue sky pic at the second point - add a digilink and you can control the sky box in the second room), or put a two way powered distribution in the loft, aerial into that and then out of that to the two points.
Really depends on the layout of your house, signal strength and what equipment you already have, there are lots of ways of doing it....
As for just sticking an aerial up and wollah, its a bit more scientific than that (although there are loads and loads of cowboys out there!)
We are the only Confederation of Aerial Industries Approved Systems Installers in North Wales and as a result do systems work for several Local Authorities and the NHS...
