I live in Montreal and I live 1.8km away from a small independent broadcaster (channel 29, Savoir-Media). I have an older channel scan from April 2025 that sees it perfectly (4 green dots), but newer scans fail to detect it. I can watch it, record from it, and have the TV guide associated with the channel. If I install the new Tablo App, it wipes it from the Tablo device.
What I have:
2 different Tablo devices 4-tuners, one with the old firmware/software that plays perfectly fine with the scan from April 2025. If I do a channel scan, it does not see channel 29. The other Tablo device used to have channel 29, but installation of the new Tablo App wiped it out.
Five different antennas, including an 8-bay antenna, a Winegard Elite 8550 with amplifier, rabbit ears, RCA indoor antenna. All say the same thing: channel 29 is one of the strongest channel. I even get PBS that is 100 km away!!
I tried all the permutations to account for too strong or too weak channel signal. And even so, how could my Tablo device with the old firmware/software can play it without a glitch if it was a signal issue?
Channel 29 is on Gracenote.
I contacted Tablo support by email and they blame the signal of course, and advised to install the latest firmware on my old second device …I guess it is one way to solve the problem, i.e. to make it simply disappear!!
Anyone else experienced somehting similar in Montreal or in your area? Were you able to make it work?
Good point Zippy, I don’t know, I don’t have access to a gen4 device. My guess is that it will have the same issue. I believe Tablo changed the criteria for a channel to be displayed, and small independent channels are left out since last year. My two legacy devices have the same behavior, i.e. channel 29 was perfectly fine, but a new scan could not detect it, so I never updated my channel lineup. However, installing the new Tablo app and connecting to the Tablo devicel automatically pushed the new channel lineup and wiped channel 29. Of course when the Tablo support person recommended I connect my second device with the new app, I kindly refused
Now that Tablo is pushing for the new App and cancelling support for the legacy app, I can see a day where they will simply cancel it altogether and we would lose access to independent local channels, and remote access!
As I recall after a certain firmware upgrade, I was unable to scan and lock some channels that I previously had been doing successfully. Long distance via Tropospheric Ducting. Tablo Gen4 exclusively.
Ch29 in Montreal is one of the lowest powered stations in Canada and the second lowest in Montreal.
The new Tablo Gen4 apps do some calculations to determine if a signal is good enough to decode. So it’s more ‘sensitive’.
Tablo support indicated the firmware scan improvement was a change in the SNR calculations. And to ‘ensure’ compliance to standards. Meaning if something is amiss in the signal, it is no longer forgiving.
What I observed was if the Signal Strength is anywhere near midpoint or below it won’t lock anymore. Regardless of Signal Quality. With few exceptions.
So don’t rescan. And don’t expect Gen4 apps to be kind.
Thanks for all the details CarbonCompound, it took me a while to go through all these!
I don’t think the issue has to do with signal, I tried so many combinations of antenna and amplifiers that I ruled out too low/high signals (and I also added a Smartkom Televes to adjust signals to no avail!)
The signal from channel 29 was always between some very high (CBC, SRC) and low (Noovo, TeleQuebec) signal channels, and these channels were always picked up by the Tablo channel scan. Something happened between firmware versions v2.2.42, v2.2.58 or v2.2.60 that changed the way certain channels are seen besides SNR.
It would be great to have the option to manually add a channel and assign a guide to it, accepting that it might not be working perfectly.
Thanks again for your input CarbonCompound, let me know if you think of other tricks! My worry for now is that Tablo will eventully force everyone to migrate to the new app and Ioose the channel.
Something happened between firmware versions v2.2.42, v2.2.58 or v2.2.60 that changed the way certain channels are seen besides SNR.
This is probably BINGO. Of course when I use roku or fire tv stick I know the physical RF and can see if the virtual channel appears and then disappears after the final channel aggregation. Of course support should be able to tell you exactly what was detected during a channel scan.
I have been going back and forth with Tablo support, they simply told me that some signals were too weak without telling me what they saw (I will ask them).
I have a Smartkom Televes preamplifier with digital signal processing, I took a screenshot of my current setup with channel 29 highlighted. I tried adjusting the gain (up and down) without any changes for the Tablo scan.
With two antennas as input and every single test telling me that every TV in my house can receive channel 29 except Tablo, and weaker channels (GlobalTV, CityTV) are still detected by Tablo, it cannot be a signal issue!
