Hopefully an improvement to my OTA setup

Thought I’d share a recent change I made to my OTA setup. My Tablo is an 8 year old OG 2 tuner. Still works like a charm.

Through the years we’ve always watched live TV through the TV’s native tuners not Tablo. Only watched recordings through Tablo. I have a solid setup of 2 Televes long range mix antennas on my roof but over time and especially after the repack some of the before strong stations can be problems when the weather/atmosphere/etc are not cooperating. And some of said stations are ones we frequently record from. I got to thinking that we really never watch live TV using the TV’s tuners anymore so why don’t I rearrange my setup to send all the OTA signal to just the Tablo. And that’s what I did.

The Televes indoor power inserter has 2 coax outputs, a main and auxiliary. I was using the aux for Tablo and the main for a 4-way distribution amp to 5 TVs. I changed it to having Tablo connected to the main output and put a terminator cap on the aux output. Ever since then (about 2 weeks now) none of my recordings have failed. I hope this continues and someday down the road I’ll give this an update. Summer will be the ultimate test.

Great no-cost improvement. Suggestion to consider, if for no other reason than “just because”, run an antenna input to at least one TV. Maybe just one day you may be glad you have it.

There may be some situation when you want to watch a local station and you know it just works. There have been grumblings where a tablo doesn’t work in emergency situations due to network/internet down… or what ever.

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Good suggestion, thanks. Another situation would be if both Tablo tuners are recording and I want to watch a 3rd program. But on the other hand I don’t think I’ve run into that in the 8 years of owning a Tablo.

All my coax cabling for all outlets come together where my power inserter and distribution amps are. All mounted to a board in the basement. If I need a TV hooked up to the antennas quickly it will only take a minute or two. :smiley_cat:

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Might just hook up the main TV to that Aux output and see if it has any effect on the Tablo. If not, you’re good to go.

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