Intermittent connectivity issue

All of a sudden we will be watching tv and the Tablo will lose connectivity.

I get can’t find Tablo errors, can’t connect to Tablo errors, and weak signal errors.

Channel scans are showing 5 green dots, antenna is mounted on chimney outside. I am los from the towers with no obstructions. It is not network related as I have a new orbi router, Tablo hardwired to router and brand new tp link Poe adapters just installed this past Sunday evening.

I have experienced this on my aftv 2 and my atv4 in the bedroom.

I know the Poe’s are getting a good signal and things were fine when connected via WiFi.
I did notice that recordings were being recorded because the hd was blinking while recording 2 shows. I’ll check recordings in a bit.

This a 4 tuner Tablo btw. I also just had the bounce back to the guide after recording a show on my Apple TV 4. This behavior has not happened for a while now.

I have to be honest, this started on Sunday night and last night it did not exhibit this behavior. Weather is not a factor as it is a clear night with chilly temps.

My problem channel in the philly area is abc. And it’s a nightmare to get. But in the past few months it’s been rock solid. I saw this behavior while watching nbc, this is us with the wife.

I have to be honest, the Tablo itself has been great so hooked it up in February March.

I am getting concerned by this behavior. It’s football season and I record the crap out of shows with this device.

Any ideas on where to possibly star looking or do I open a ticket and reference this post. I am really concerned with the errors as I have experienced these in the past…

Checked how your antenna is pointed. I had odd “tuner” issues from time to time even though I would run a channel scan and it would come back green. I went over to TVFool and entered my exact address and it returned the compass degree for each channel in my area. Then using my iPhone I checked with the compass the degrees my antenna was pointing to. I kid you not, I was 5* off. The channel I would lose connection to most often also happened to be ABC. TVFool said that channel was at 140* and I was at 135*. I adjusted my antenna point at 140* per my iPhone’s compass and I have not had a tuner issue since.

Just a thought.

As I thought, looks like 6 separate recordings for this is us. I am going to have to see if this behavior continues.

Antenna is good,but will double check this weekend.

The issue started on Sunday after you replaced your router and started using Powerline Ethernet adapters?

If yes, why are you so certain the issue isn’t network related?

I am certain because the router was replaced 2 weeks ago after my Apple router died. Every other streaming client on aftv2 and atv4 stream without issue.

Netflix, amazon prime movies, plex and tv anywhere apps perform without issue.

The replacement of the poe’s Resulted from a power loss that seemed to impact the original poe’s Because anything connected to them was hosed.

New ones in and everything works.

Tablo is the only device with a problem suddenly. My Tablo has been very solid since I installed it up to this point. It has been wired to my old and new router and worked without issue. Maybe the power outage the other night impacted the Tablo or the Poe”s impacted it.

What I do know is that a device that was performing fine without issue for months, is all of a sudden acting very oddly all of a sudden.

@Canons900 I’m a tad confused. Maybe (probably) because I’m dense. You mention POE (that’s Power over Ethernet)

That describes a way to have electrical power at a location where there is no power - for instance where you want to place an IP camera.

Here’s the TP-Link device they have for this:

http://www.tp-link.com/us/products/details/cat-43_TL-POE150S.html

Now, on the other had, if you try to take broadband over power lines in your house, you’re probably talking about powerline extenders, such as described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-line_communication

And here are some TP-link devices that fits that bill: http://www.tp-link.com/us/products/details/cat-5034_TL-WPA4220KIT.html

Now I will tell you that I’ve never read a lot of good things about the latter category.I may be misinformed, and it may all be subject to the fact that I’ve not investigated them in the last few years, and that I suspect I have terrible wiring in my old house.

I believe these things don’t perform well, and are subject to fluctuations and being filtered out by surge suppressors and all manner of other disadvantages. I’'d start by connecting a device such as a laptop to that connection and seeing how it performs.

Two very good speed tests I use for connectivity are of course, http://beta.speedtest.net/ and also the HTML5 speed test that measures a lot more.

These are what I purchased and installed: http://www.tp-link.com/la/products/details/cat-18_TL-PA9020P-KIT.html

Ethernet over power adapters. Simply sending my data over the electrical wiring in my home.

Again, I do not believe this to be a networking issue as all other streaming apps and devices do not exhibit this behavior.

Weak signal errors after ensuring the antenna direction is checked and channel scans completed. All seems good on that end.

Why the bounce out after a tuner is released from a recording, wasn’t this fixed in a previous firmware update? Random disconnects while watching a show? On both the fire tv 2 and apple tv 4’s. It seems like something is wrong with the device all of a sudden.

Hard drive has been checked and I do not see any issues with the 2 TB WD passport. Even checked usb cords and swapped them. Has worked fine since installation. I think I will submit a ticket and have them check the logs to see what might be going on. This is random behavior that is frustrating to deal with at best.

I love the product and it has been awesome up to this point. I just don’t want to deal with these hassles going forward as they take up a lot of time to troubleshoot and document. I’ve already spent a lot of time with this “project” and want the tool to do it’s job.

I’ll open a ticket now…

You cant directly compare other apps to Tablo apps. Tablo transmits a LOT more data per second than any of the normal streaming apps. Additionally the other apps can vary the bandwindth (transcode rate) on the fly, Tablo can not.

I have had issues where a receiving device couldn’t keep up with the Tablo data transfer rate and it did all kinds of weird things, form the normally expected buffering to Tablo disconnects. In those cases yes all the other apps worked fine. My issues were Wifi related and eventually resolved.

If it worked fine on the old Ethernet adapters and not on the new ones, it definitely sounds like your new ones are not transmitting at the same rate (or at least not transmitting the data as cleanly) as the old ones.

Sure, the power outage could have damaged the Tablo. Its unlikely though since it sits behind a AC/DC power adapter and usually if a power outage, brown out or spike damages anything, it damages the power converter brick without damaging the device connected to it. I said usually though, its not 100%.

Tablo support is a great place to start, personally I would grab another brand Ethernet adapter and give them a try at the same time. Use a major retailer and you can always send them back if it turns out to be an actual Tablo box issue.

I was using a different brand earlier (zyxel) and they were giving me multiple issues. Hence the move to TP-link.

I removed the “faulty” poe’s from the environment, I have replaced my old router with a new one, because it died on me and APple is not committed to their routers any longer. And they are not very configurable for some of the networking changes many of us need to accomplish in order to access Tablo remotely, synch the data and what not.

I’ll have the support team take a look and see what they say based on the logs.

Okay, rescanned channels was showing abc with one red dot. I checked it a couple of times throughout the evening. It was consistently showing 1 red dot this evening.

That explains the weak signal error. I hope.

I am running the Tablo now watching jimmy Fallon and it seems ok. Will monitor the next couple of nights. I removed abc from my channel lineup and updated the guide.

Abc is a vhf channel,don’t know if it is low or high, but is extremely difficult to get in the philly area. It is also extremely low powered. I don’t know what has changed with this channel because it has been really performing well since March.

I’ll keep scanning over the next couple of days and I may even call the station to see if they are doing maintenance or maybe something else has gone wrong.

I have an rca yagi style antenna on the chimney and it’s been excellent since installing. Maybe lte interference, there is cell tower 2 streets away and we have 5 cell phones in the family. But I really don’t think it’s lte interference.

I also noticed my iPad ran flawlessly, but I did notice it said there was no hard drive when it should have been syncing after connecting. Again, could be weak signal related, but I just don’t know. Could be the hard is crapping the bed even though the hd is only a few months old. I have a 5 tb Seagate drive I could test with if it comes to that.

For now my plan is to work with support when I hear back from them. I don’t want to update the ticket I created earlier today as I will bounced to the bottom of the queue. Why ticket updates are handled in this manner really puzzle me. I am in it and run a support center. My clients would not be happy if we ran things this way, but hey. Not my shop. Hopefully they are looking in the community and will see this.

So I am thinking weak signal, maybe hd drive issue. Or a combination of both.

I’ll repost if anything changes or if support comes back with anything.

@Canons900 - We’ve got your ticket and will look at things more in-depth today! Stay tuned.

Will be in debug mode after soccer practice tonight… I’ll also reply via the ticket! Thanks for the quick response!

I did remove the offending channel. Yes that is how I’m referring to abc in the philly area. It’s my white whale and the channel from hell!

Gonna try and watch some football while my kid practices.

So far so good. Removed the weak channel and cleaned up a bunch of failed recordings due to weak signal.

Past 2 nights seem to be okay.

Even the tablo channel in plex seems to be running better.

Moving items off the Tablo hard drive and putting them in plex, while a manual process. Seems to fit the bill.

I wish I could automate taking the shows off my Tablo, I use a Mac and move them to my plex server. I don’t remove commercials because I just don’t have time. And if the kids are that lazy they can’t ffw through them . Too bad!

Bu if I could find apps to do it, I would.

I use the SurLaTablo Python script to move shows from the Tablo to my Plex server. Runs in a cron job, totally automated.

Will that run a mac? I don’t have a lot scripting skill!

I currently run the one tool one of folks on this developed. But I run it manually have to make sure my computer does fall asleep or the app stops running.

Then I copy to flash drive and throw everything in plex.

I’m open for a better way…

Yes, it runs on Macs. I run the SurLaTablo commands in a shell script using cron. That runs on the same system Plex is on, so it saves the files directly into the Plex media folder. I have also run it on a different machine with the Plex files mounted from a file server. That system is always on, so I don’t have to worry about it going to sleep and not running.

I’ll need to look into this.

Here’s a sample of the script run via cron:

#!/bin/sh -
set -e
cd "/Volumes/Media/"
/usr/local/bin/surlatablo.py --convert --query series~="America's Test Kitchen" Shrink
/usr/local/bin/surlatablo.py --convert --query series~="Lethal Weapon" Shrink
/usr/local/bin/surlatablo.py --convert --query series~="The Big Bang Theory" Shrink

Tablo support verified abc was the issue. Signal dropouts and errors on the tuner. Hd was and is fine.

I called the station again today and spoke to the Vp of engineering. No station work being done and this a vhf lo station at 85 htrz. Very difficult to tune in.

He mentioned changes in my home recently that could impact the radio frequency, like led light bulbs and what not. Got me thinking a bit…

Solar panels were added after the antenna was in April. Abc came in no problems at all until 2 weeks ago. I don’t think they are the issue.

I installed a new orbi router and the Tablo is near it on a shelf in the office. I will try moving them further away from each other to see if that resolves the issue.

I also installed a hue bridge in my bedroom, attached to the orbi satellite. I installed 8 hue lights, 2 in my bedroom and 4 in my sons ceiling fan and 2 in regular lamps in hisndedroom.

The lights have not been on when the issues with abc were occurring.

I will see if moving the router and Tablo further apart and go from there first. Then I will look into the hue lights and maybe remove the hue lights and see what happens wHen I take hub off line. And see if that makes any difference.

Tablo support was great, the tech was thorough in his email. Can’t ask for more right now from Tablo. And since I removed the channel, things are back to normal overall. I am also going to try hooking up my spare antenna directly to the tv and see if that makes a difference. I believe it is a Clearstream 2. Will report back…

Just wanted to follow up with the community.

2 Likes

You mentioned that you’re using Phillips Hue lights. As an experiment, you may want to turn them “off” at the wall switch, not just through the Hue hub. You may also want to unplug the Hue hub for the purposes of the test. The Hue bulbs communicate with the hub during the day, even if not emitting light. The wifi section of the bulb uses about 1-2 watts, even if not “on”.

While wifi is in another frequency band (than low VHF) you may be seeing some interference. I’ve not seen Hue hub or bulb interference in my house, but the TV channels here in Ft Wayne all are UHF channels.

1 Like