My first Tablo Dual Lite tuner went bad after about 2 years. So I bought a Tablo Dual HDMI. So after 1 1/2 years it too has a bad tuner. Seems like Tablo tuners don’t last long for some reason. So I bought a new Tablo Quad HDMI today. Will see how long it last. If I can’t get 4 or 5 years out of such a simple device I’ll give up on them. I would expect things to go wrong with a Tablo from time to time ,but tuners are tried and true part of any system.
Has this happened to anyone else ?
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I have a regular (non-HDMI) quad that is about 4 years old. My second Tablo DVR (added for extra tuners) is about 2 years old. Neither of them have had any problems.
Do you have the antenna grounded properly, and are you using a surge protector on the Tablo DVRs?
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I have 2 OG 2-tuners approaching the 7 year mark with their original WD drives. I also have a dual64 that looks like an original dual lite for 3 years.
None of these have had any hardware issues. And I would think the odds of randomly having 2 units having tuners go bad is super high. Lots of other bits and pieces of hardware could go bad besides tuners
I would be looking at something in the operating enivironment
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I have a 4 tuner Tablo that is approximately 6.5 years old and a second 4 tuner I purchased used approximately 4 years ago and I believe it was around 1 year old when I bought it. I haven’t had any problems with the tuners in either Tablo. I agree with @ronintexas and @zippy that it’s more likely to be a problem with either your antenna system or electrical system than with the design of the Tablo’s tuners.
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" Do you have the antenna grounded properly, and are you using a surge protector on the Tablo DVRs? " Yes and Yes.
The TV tuner pulls in 42 channels and the Tablo, 0.
I’m thinking I may have really poor luck. To many people out there have had theirs for 4 years and longer with no issues.
4 PLUS years. My Tablos date back close to the beginning of it all. But HW problems do happen, just strange to have it happen to one person multiple times.
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I have been using a Tablo 4-Turner with WD 5TB hard drive for over 5 years, no issues. I had some minor issues due to over heating, but a laptop fan fixed and has not reoccurred.
I can pile on in regards to no issues with long term use. Have 3 Tablo’s, the oldest is 5+ years at this point. Other two over 3 years.
In fact, I even had one of them hit by lightening across the networking cable, blew out that port but switched it to wifi and its been going another 2 years…
With all of that said, my very first Tablo was purchased “used” from a large online retailer (this was before Tablo started refurbishing them, themselves). It did indeed have a bad tuner in it, verified by tech support at the time.
So yes the tuners CAN go out, but based on anecdotal information here, its rare.
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UPDATE ON FAILED Dual HDMI Tablo: My Dual HDMI is now working and pulling in more channels than ever before. After over a week of Tablo troubleshooting I had given up. So I opened it up to find a small wire was hanging on by a thread . So I reconnected it and the Tablo now pulls in 51 channels. Before this at best 39 was the best it ever did. Now it is much better and the picture is much improved. So I have one that failed and this 2nd is no longer a failure. I will be moving this one from my house to my RV. Buying the new quad HDMI for the house now.
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Glad you were able to fix it! Do you have a pic of the wire in case others have a similar issue?
The HDMI units are relatively new, it wasn’t still under warranty?
No pictures. I had not thought about that.
Was out of warranty. Tablo did try and trouble shoot remotely for a week.
I was just told all of my tuners for my 1.5 yr old quad are dead. Seems strange that a device with no moving parts would go out.
I’d replace the power adapter, as they definitely don’t last forever.
It’s cheap, and won’t hurt to have a spare.
I concur with others. Either something happened or you have had a streak of bad luck. With as many as they have sold no doubt at least a few duds were in there. I’m coming up on 4 years with no issues.
My current Tablo " quad HDMI " has been working fine for about 6 months now with no issues. My old one still works also and has been doing so sense the fix. I can’t always get TV signal where we camp but when we do I it works just fine.
If you experience no signal from antenna with your tablo or can only get a few channels I recommend hooking up your antenna to a splitter and connecting it to a TV as well as tablo. I have found when doing so you get all tv channels in local area like you are supposed to on your TV but when you look at your Tablo live tv guide you see very few to no channels. After hours of experimenting and buying all new parts, antenna, coax cables, splitters and such it all boils down to tablo having a faulty coax connector or faulty inner tuner. No need for remote assistance from Tablo support on this as there is no way for them to determine this with out physically inspecting unit. I am bummed my unit has failed after 4 years and even more depressed Tablo has no units with hard drives for sale. If you have no signal with your Tablo don’t jump to conclusions it’s your antenna or coax cable without checking it to a tv first.
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Hi there @Toby612,
Indeed our two Tablo unit types with storage included are currently sold out. However, given you have an existing unit, you would likely want to transfer your recordings to your new unit anyway.
As an option, you can simply get either a Dual Lite or a Quad and then use this guide to transfer your existing hard drive to the new unit.
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Unfortunately you can not move recordings over once they have been recorded on your installed hardrive Tablo. As Tech support you should know this already. Transferring only works with external drives or flash drives. I would never recommend a flash drive in use with a Tablo anyway. The quality is reduced drastically with buffering with use of flash drive.