We had a killer over-the-air (OTA) antenna installed a couple of months ago. Excellent reception, no pixelation whatsoever. Except…
As suggested by the antenna company, we also added a Tablo Gen 4 to feed the antenna wirelessly to our two smart TVs.
Every local channel (150+) comes in great except Channel 11, DFW’s CBS affiliate. This is not a problem if we watch live, OTA TV (bypassing Tablo) but, it’s hit-and-miss if we want to watch recorded shows from Ch. 11.
Any thoughts?
Did you try turning on the amplifier in the Tablo settings? If it’s already on, try turning it off.
The amp is on. When I turn it off I get a weak signal error.
Also, tower distance should not be an issue. It’s less than eight miles from my home, and is clustered with most of the other TV towers in Cedar Hill, TX.
The fact that you mention chan 11 as your problem indicates that you are many miles from the antenna farm like me.
I’m a few miles north of Frisco. That puts me about 50 miles away from the chans 11/21 transmitter antenna. I knew that the OTA received signal will be weak at 50 miles. I inserted amplifiers until the strongest chan saturated the Tablo front end. I then removed one amplifier. That left me with 40db of amplification.
Chan 11 transmits with one million watts of power and is still one of the weakest signals that I receive. There were periods last weekend when it was completely gone on all 3 Tablos.
You might not need as much amplification as me. One 20db amp will probably work for you. Also, turn on the amp in your gen 4.
I have found that the tuners in the Tablo are more picky about weak signals than most TV tuners are.
You mentioned that you have the amp in the Tablo turned on. You also said that you get better signal when you bypass the Tablo. Did you move the wire, or do you have a splitter? The signal will be weakened each time it passes through a simple splitter. I have a Televes antenna that came with an amp that also splits the signal. I have both amps turned on. This isn’t necessarily the solution for every installation, but it certainly works well for me.
@scosio - ditto for us with KTVT Ch11. Could it be that it’s a 1080i channel? Don’t know, but we have the same issue in the mid-Cities area, only about 16 miles from the Cedar Hill tower farm.
8, 16 and 50 miles are the mentioned distances from the KTVT tranmitter. KTVT is located and licensed in Fort Worth. I suspect that their transmitter beam is shaped to provide more power to the North West toward FW. Dallas and other areas to the North East just have to struggle with the reduced power aimed in their direction. KTVT is chartered to primarily serve FW.
Do have the 2 or 4 tuner model? the 4 tuner model splits the signal 4 ways so that could degrade the signal enough to cause a problem.
I have the legacy network 2-tuner Tablo from 2015. The only reason we bought a new Tablo was for the 4 tuners.
The more times you split a signal the lower the signal is for each receiver. Say you have 1 cable coming from the antenna and split that into 2, 1 for the TV and 1 for the Tablo. The TV has 1/2 of the signal and the Tablo has 1/2. The Tablo now splits that either 2 or 4 ways so its dealing with either 1/4 or 1/8 of the signal coming from the antenna.
Also do either of you have really good cellphone reception or an FM radio station nearby? A 5G/LTE or FM filter might help.
A few things. Pixilating getting worse when the internal amp is turned off indicates that the addition of an external amp might help. I have a total of 40 db of amplification for reasons that I explain in a previous post.
I do have the 5G/LTE filter in place. Honestly, the filter didn’t make any difference.
We are actually dealing with 2 chans, 11 and the sister station on 21. Both transmitters are on the same antenna and of all things transmit on adjacent rf chans. Chan 11 is rf 19 and chan 21 is rf 18. They normally try to avoid adjacent chans in the same area due to interference.
I don’t know about anyone else but there are times when 11.1 and all sub chans go away completely and the 21.X chans will still be good. Then there are times when 11.X and 21.X will both go away.
We also have a filter and a 8-port distribution amp (4db/output) and we’re only 15-16 miles from the towers. I have an old archer antenna in the attic pointing in the direction of the towers. I might just use AntennaMan’s advice and buy the Mediasonic tuner just to get the signal meter. I might also look into a new 2- or 4-bay antenna for outside.
We typically only watch local channel 11.1 (not 21.x) and it blanks out during recordings but not when we watch via antenna-only, bypassing the Tablo altogether. I have outputs on the distribution amp running to both the Tablo and the TV. This is why it is so important to have a decent signal meter built into the Tablo or TV.
I’ve never seen the channels just “go away”, but they do blank out for 2 or 3 seconds on the recordings or when watching “live” through the Tablo.
I have questions about the distribution amp - should all the signals coming out of the ports be the same power/strength? If so, I should be able to connect the Mediasonic to one of the ports and tune the antenna and therefore all the ports should get the same tuning. Is this correct?
Considering your distance, i would first try a single amp between the antenna and the input to the disty amp.
You will normally have the same signal strength at each port. However, all unused ports need to be terminated into a 75 ohm load to prevent reflections and standing waves.
@scosio - are you still experiencing this issue? We still have this problem, but I noticed that it doesn’t occur on my Android phone while watching the recording.
My wife and I typically watch the CBS Sunday Morning show around 1:00 PM on Sunday. Sometimes the audio and video disruptions are so bad that it’s almost unbearable to watch.
I noticed that the ‘drops’ occur at the same time, every time I watch the recording and it only occurs when using the Roku (can’t use the Samsung TabloTV app at the moment to test this because it just doesn’t work anymore to watch recordings).
I just purchased a Fire TV Stick Max to test out, but it’ll be a few days before I can get it hooked up and tested over the holidays.
Yep. Problem still persists. It cleared up for about a week and then returned.
We record Jeopardy every night and are able to watch 1 or 2 episodes per week because of the interference.
@astrojimbo - being 50 miles away, do you have any issues watching Ch 11 live or recordings through TabloTV?
Maybe today is the day I get my Fire Stick connected and tested. If that doesn’t work, I’ll move on to the ONN.
I’m only eight miles from the KTVT tower. It’s weird that the only time I get pixelation is when watching live/recorded through Tablo, and only that one channel. I haven’t checked the reception through my phone. I’ll try that next.
I thought about reaching out to a CBS11 engineer for advice but Tablo is not their problem.
Cc: @TabloTV
Same here - only that one channel through TabloTV seems to be affected. The video/audio freezes and drops repeatedly occur at the same point during the program when rewound and rewatched. We have a Legacy device and I just reviewed the same recorded program from the same time and channel and it does not occur on that device’s recording. These two devices are fed from the same antenna using an 8-port distribution amp.
To be clear - this behavior does not occur when I use my Android phone TabloTV app to watch the same recording where it does occur while watching on my Roku Ultra/Samsung TV.
@TabloTV -
Yes! I do have big-time issues watching Ch 11. There are times when it and the sub chans go away completely. 21 also goes away at times.
This has been bothering me for a while so I decided to do some research.After all, I’m a long retired octogenarian who needs to keep the old brain active.
I mentioned in a previous post that 11.x and 21.x are located on the same tower. Well, it’s worse than that. The data available shows that 33.x and 4 ATSC3 chan’s are also on the same tower. The transmit power of all but 33.x is 1 megawatt. 33.x is 780 killowatt.
Virtual Ch Actual Ch Tx Power
11.x 19 1 MW
21.x 18 1 MW
33.x 32 780 KW
ATSC3 34 1 MW
4.1
23.1
33.1
49.1
What really bothers me most is that Chs 11.x and 21.x transmit on adjacent frequencies. The newer modulation techniques are supposed to reduce modulation interference between adjacent chan’s. I believe the new modulation techniques combine phase shifting (Quadrature), amplitude and sideband modulation. It’s pretty complex. I will accept that adjacent channel interference is reduced by the new modulation techniques but only when there is some distance between the megawatt transmitters. The picture shows that the transmitter antennae are separated by just a few feet at the top of the tower. My near 60 years of rf experience tells me that this is the root cause of the problem. The real issue could be how Tablo handles the distortion that is created.
Google maps is great!
We’d like to look into this.
If you would, please contact our technical support team: https://support.tablotv.com/hc/en-us/#contact .
If you do, please share your Tablo’s SSID with them. Also, DM us your ticket number and the email you used to reach out to support.
