First, I have to say that email support has been less than helpful about this. When I bought my first Tablo years ago it refused to see (not listed in a channel scan) a local repeater only 2 miles from me, clustered with many of the other transmitters serving the area, and providing great signal levels to all the TV’s on my distribution system. Tablo service reps were great then. If I remember correctly the repeater comes out of a station 100 miles north of me that does not serve my local area except by repeater. Additionally, it’s a second CBS affiliate but has many subchannels that the local affiliate doesn’t provide. Tablo or the guide provider made a change and the repeater showed up with good signal levels in the channel scan… Until I recently purchased a new Tablo. It won’t pick up the repeater, but the Tablo tier one guy doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that what shows up in a channel scan depends on something more than signal strength. Due to my previous experience I’m 99.9% sure that the scan also has to do with zip code and what’s expected to be available in an area, or perhaps it rejects duplicate major networks (2.x and 3.x) or something. Does anyone have direct knowledge of this? The tone of the email’s I’m getting back is making me wonder if support isn’t training up as well as they used to.
I get 76 channels with 24 being duplicates and no it does not reject any of them. However I do reject some duplicates when adding them to the guide. I have 41 channels in my guide.
If the virtual channel number is a duplicate, Tablo chooses the channel through the database based on Zip Codes. Maybe you can play around with the zip codes and see which gives you the right lineup. I have to use downtown Austin (45 miles away) because using my local zip code doesn’t give the right lineup. This isn’t Tablo - it is gracenote (I believe that is the company name) that provides the data for Tablo.
The zip code used before a channel scan does not have any bearing on the results of the scan. This has been the same since the Tablo was released.
However, the zip code does have bearing on the guide data assigned to the channels you add to the guide - this is often confused with the actual results of the scan.
If the channel itself appears and disappears in the scan, this is usually the result of a reception issue.
There are some rare cases that can impact the results of the scan, e.g if the broadcaster has misconfigured a specific channel and it does not follow broadcasting specifications, then it may not appear properly in scans for many OTA devices including Tablo.