Have you checked the Baltimore\Washington OTA reception thread at AVS Forums?
Has there been any resolution to this matter? I have an Antop antenna mounted on my roof and live 21 miles from the tower. I have a Fire Recast and I’m experiencing the same issues. My plasma TV, however, has no problems when I connect directly. Thinking it was an Amazon issue, I purchased a Tablo Lite and the problem remains.
I’m no longer getting channel 13 WJZ either. Says weak signal on scan but strong signal after returning to the channel list. Was fine for years until this week. Might play with the antenna tomorrow.
I have a hunch that adjusting your antenna is not going to do the trick, but please keep us posted.
It was my amplifier. Had to cycle power on it and all is well.
Thanks for the reply. That’s definitely not my issue unfortunately.
I too have been having a problem with 13.1 WJZ. I have a Terk receiver that works perfect, and I also have the amazon recast so I can record the Ravens games and watch them later. I am having reception issues with 13.1 WJZ. And only WJZ. The CBS station out of DC comes in fine. I live 4.6 miles from the WJZ tower. Fox 45 is coming from the same direction and it comes in perfect. I have a clearstream 4max pointed towards DC and a clearstream 2 max pointed directly at the tower using a compass to get the right position. I use a splitter turned backwards to send signal from both antennas to the recast tuner. Both cables from each antenna are the same length and I have then approx 3 feet apart from each other. I do have a rack of 36 solar panels in the back yard, so I don’t know if they are creating “noise” or not. The reception does seem to get better at night. I have been pulling my hair out trying to get the channel to come in so I can watch football without signal loss.
tallman, are you using the fire recast on it by chance?
Negative, I have several Apple TVs. Everything has been running smoothly since I ended up replacing the amplifier.
PS I’m in PA like 50 miles away from the tower.
Did you rescan channels?
yes i did. I think it has to do with WJZ being a VHF while every other channel is UHF. I don’t know very much about all this, so learning as I go.
I’ve had my Tablo Quad for 6 months now, and this has been a non-stop issue for me. I’ve moved my antennas 4 times, tried different dual-antenna configurations using a Winegard combiner, changed to a different amplifier (I have a 250 foot run from antennas to point-of-use), and while ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX all broadcast from the same location I only have issues with CBS (channel 13). I’m hoping for an improvement after it changes to broadcast channel 11 by May. Although that also means I may start having issues with channel 11 since it is moving too…
In Baltimore, I’ve tried multiple antennas and CBS has been pixelated on all of them…
I see I am not alone. I just found this thread as I look for an answer. I live north of Baltimore, about 22 miles to the towers. I recently switched over to an attic mounted antenna, coax direct to TABLO Dual Lite, and then to my router to push the signal throughout the house. Looks great EXCEPT for CH 13. Tried moving the antenna around and used the apps to help locate the direction of the incoming signal. I’ll keep searching. If it ever gets solved please post.
I have been having the same issue with WJZ-13 on a new Tablo QUAD. Very long story short, I gathered a LOT of info and opened a trouble ticket with Tablo Support. I received a quick response (less than a day) which requested I put the Tablo into “remote session” (a.k.a., “heartbeat”) mode so a support person could take a closer look at the channel. She found WJZ-13 had a HUGE amount of interference (“most I’ve ever seen”) while WBAL-11 did not. It turns out a lot of interference makes it difficult for the Tablo to transcode the signal for display on a streaming device, e.g., Roku.
After researching the issue and talking with support at length, I have a hypothesis:
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FACT: WJZ-13 is currently using directional broadcasting. The signal is reduced from approximately North-Northeast to South-Southwest, with the greatest reduction being to the west.
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SPECULATION: Why would the FCC require this? Perhaps because there is some sort of broadcast to the west of Baltimore on the same frequency. I could not find any such broadcasters in Maryland, but perhaps another entity is using the frequency at sufficiently high power to create interference.
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Tablo Support says the pixelation problem occurs on Tablos but not regular TVs because: [1] the Tablo splits (& weakens) the signal, although it also has an internal amplifier to compensate, and [2] the Tablo transcodes the signal from native MP2 to reduce DVR storage requirements, reduce network traffic, and make it easier for streaming devices to display the TV. In contrast, TVs only have 1 tuner and (more importantly, in my opinion) they work with the native, non-transcoded data stream.
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HYPOTHESIS: I suspect the real problem here is that that the transcoding process is not dealing with the large amount of interference WJZ-13 is experiencing. The original signal is probably corrupt enough to mess up transcoding the raw data stream but not enough to be a problem for TVs dealing with that native signal.
The GOOD NEWS, as noted earlier in this thread, is that WJZ-13 is moving to RF channel 11 while WBAL-11 is moving to RF channel 12, expected to be by May 1, 2020. Interestingly, the FCC repack leaves RF 13 unused in the Baltimore area. I suspect that’s by design. Also, as noted elsewhere in this thread, WJZ-13 will switch from a directional to an omnidirectional broadcast pattern, another sign, in my opinion, that RF 13 has interference issues in Baltimore metro while RF 11 & 12 do not.
HOPEFULLY, once the repack is complete WJZ-13 will no longer experience signal interference, the transcoding will then work correctly, and the picture will finally be acceptable. Fingers crossed!
I just updated my Tablo QUAD to the 2.2.28 firmware. Even though the FCC repack for WJZ-13 is almost 2 months away, just for grins, I rescanned and included that channel in my updated lineup. Woo Hoo - it now works! I don’t know whether something has improved at the transmission end, whether the source of interference has gone away, or whether the 2.2.28 firmware has made the transcoding process more “resilient” when dealing with “dirty” signals. I suspect the latter and, if that’s the actual reason, my SINCERE THANKS to Tablo engineering for fixing this issue!
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Same here. I switched over to WJZ and watched for a bit just to check it out and it seems to be fixed. Thanks for posting a reply, I have been avoiding WJZ!