But their political campaigns and elections are more rational.
Borrring! We prefer mud slinging theatrics and snappy sound bites. Keeps us from nodding off.
I dunno… Sometimes we get a bit wild & crazy:
OK…but I get my impressions of Canada from watching Murdoch! He invented a heck of a lot of things we currently use!!!
Okay, now I’m lost what with all the talk of Murdoch, Canadian campaigns, etc.! Though my dad was from Cape Breton, most of my impressions of Canada come from Bob & Doug.
After an evening with the new network, this will be a fine solution once I get the reception sorted. And that’s not on Tablo, just gonna be trial-and-error. SWMBO (or Herself, if y’all are more familiar with that term) is okay with the Tablo now that she doesn’t have to wait 45-60 seconds each time she FF/RW. And for me, that’s what matters!
What antenna do you have and where is it placed?
Before I started this whole thing, I went to TVFool.com and checked my address. The locals were within 40 miles and in two clusters, one around 320 degrees magnetic, and the other at 2 degrees magnetic. I picked up a 1byOne Indoor antenna (so-called 50-mile, amplified) from Amazon. Tried it on a 2nd floor TV; worked okay (it was oriented more towards the 2 degree cluster, but the others came in).
When the Tablo arrived, I moved the antenna to my home office (2nd floor). I positioned the antenna in a window in the same orientation as when I tried it on the TV. The channel scan on Tablo shows 5 green on the stations I want. However, I get pixelation on most channels. The worst pixelation comes on the stations at the 320 magnetic cluster (no real surprise there).
I’m going to pick up a ClearStream 2V today and try that. I’m hopeful it will lock in the stations without pixelation.
At that distance I’d go with a Clearstream 4. I have friends 35 miles from the broadcast towers and they use the C4 from their attic. Does very well; they also use a preamp. I’m not sure the C2 will give you that much more than the 1byOne - it doesn’t have a high gain figure for that distance.
Unless you want to point the 1byOne at one cluster of stations and the C2 at another and join them together with a splitter inverted to be a combiner. That could work since the clusters are in different directions 42 degrees apart. Most antennas effectively have a 20 to 30 degree beamwidth; anything on the periphery of that range results in a weakened signal and pixelation as the antenna is then picking up the signal on its side lobes. A preamp may help with the C2.
I ended up doing this. The C2 managed to lock the cluster I had trouble with, but then had issues with the other cluster. I took a spare splitter and ran the coax from both antennae into it, then to the Tablo. So far, no pixelation on any of the stations. Time will tell.
One interesting thing: after I joined the antennae with the splitter, I tried to do a rescan. The Tablo told me “No channels found.” Yet I can watch all the channels via the Tablo. Go figure.
Is it possible that on the rescan the Tablo found no channels (for some reason) yet retained the channels from the previous scan?
An inverted splitter acting as a combiner will not lessen the signal strength; signal strength is lost (known as “insertion loss”) when a signal is split, not when antennas or signals are combined (there is a slight loss but only half a db). So the Tablo would not get diminished signals from a combiner. Without pixelation, that means the two antennas are providing adequate signals from the two directions.
Now why the rescan failed is mysterious when viewing shows the channels clear and present… I can understand the Tablo’s scan failing if BOTH antennas are presenting the same channels which offset each other (or cancel each other out) but then the Tablo should not be able to view them subsequently.
Another user at this forum has indicated that Tablo’s scans can be flakey and that he has scanned and rescanned until a rescan is successful.
BTW is the 1byOne amplified? The C2 normally isn’t amplified. Wondering if two antennas combined where one is amplified and the other is not can cause this scan problem (mismatch if there is an overlap of channels)?
That’s exactly what happened.
The 1byOne comes with an amplifier. I put it in line after the combiner, so the outputs from both antennae are getting amplified.
This is just a supposition since I don’t know the internals of a Tablo: when the scan takes place, nothing else is going on in the Tablo so we may have a signal overload situation for the scanning tuner. Then when the scan is finished, both tuners start processing the signal and the dual workload lessens the overload situation? This is a guess because if an initial scan cannot detect a signal, how can it later be displayed - simply weird?
I had a similar problem with a cluster of towers to the West and another cluster to the North East. I put 2 HDB8X antennas in the attic, one pointing to each cluster.
My research on the internet led me to believe that if you are going to combine 2 antennas they should be the exact same antennas with the same type and length of cable from each antenna to the combiner, or you will have problems. (Unless you are combining a UHF and VHF antenna, and then you want to filter out any VHF signal from the UHF antenna, etc. before you combine them.)
Following those guidelines I haven’t had any issues with signal. I also have an amp right after the signals are combined.
They can be different antennas with different cable lengths IF pointing in different directions AND not sharing the same signals. Perhaps the 42 degree spread is not sufficient since pointing antennas in different directions works best when the spread is 90 degrees apart or more.
The only reason I suggested the combining test with disparate antennas is that @danok_1 already had an existing antenna to test with and was in the process of getting another different one. But I agree that using identical antennas and cable lengths is the ideal especially if the range is within a 40 to 60 degree spread where there can be signal overlap on both antennas.
Just a quick update: all still seems to be working fine. No LPW/buffering. Good reception. I haven’t tried to rescan, but I also have no reason to.
I understand the antenna setup I’ve put in isn’t “ideal/correct”, but it appears to be working.
Thanks to all y’all for your input and advice!
-Dan
If you ever need to rescan, hook up just one antenna as you did in the past, get all the channels regardless of reception quality and then hook back in the second antenna for the added strength.