Green & Pink Recordings and Live TV

I just received my new Quad and got it all hooked up and running. Everything was working well, setup some recordings, watched some live TV, watched some recorded programs, all seemed fine. That is, until I was flipping through some live channels. I happened to tune to a station that was a one of the weaker reception stations. Tablo shows it as 5 green dots, but I know it to be one that doesn’t come in well (the picture pixelated and dropped out from time-to-time). The first time I tuned to the channel I received an error message that the reception was too poor (I can’t remember the exact message). The 2nd time I tuned to it, I came in clear for a few minutes. When I came back to it a 3rd time, the picture was completely Green and Pink.

I normally wouldn’t worry about this except that from that point forward, every channel was Green and Pink. I did a channel rescan to confirm that there wasn’t something causing some temporary anomaly with the reception, but I still had strong signal on the channels you would expect. Yet those still came in Green and Pink. Since it was late, I disconnect my Roku from the Tablo and called it a night.

When I woke up, all the recordings that took place over the evening all came out Green and Pink. Live TV was still Green and Pink on all channels. I did a power cycle on the Tablo and it resolved the problem, but my concern is that this may be an going issue. I found some old topics with people who experienced a similar issue, but there seemed to be no follow-up or resolution.

Anyone else have this issue before? Does it popup from time-to-time, or should I hope this is just a freak occurrence? I removed the weak channel for now to see if that removes the issue. Just wondering if there is anything else I should do.

I’ve had a similar issue where trying to watch a weak signal channel too long made the Tablo unstable.
The problem seems to be with OTA signals that vary signal strength between good enough, to non-existant.
Specifically, the OTA signal will be strong for a few seconds, then weak for a few seconds, then strong, then weak, …
The Tablo seems to choke on those.

It’s normal to see pixelation or some ‘tearing’ in the video coming in at very low reception levels. However, the rest of the behaviour you described is a little odd. We’d like to take a look; I’ve sent you a PM with some next steps.

I’ve removed the channels I think were the offending weak signal channels for now. I believe most of my other channels are sufficient, but I have yet to really tweak my antenna. I put it up in the winter and it was freezing rain at the time. Being out on the roof in the freezing rain, I really didn’t spend too much time dialing things in. Luckily I already had the mount up, but it was still no fun.

I really wish the Tablo had a ‘Antenna Pointing’ setting that showed the signal strength of the stations in a numeric format (i.e. 0 to 100) or something similar. Maybe that isn’t possible with the hardware, but it would sure be handy.

Thank you very much. Hoping it is an isolated incident, but would be happy for you to take a look.