I set my tablo up in late december. Here’s my previous set up -
Attic antenna, coax running from above second story to under the house to two tv’s in main living area. second run directly from attic to a 3rd bedroom. The longest run was amplified. It worked ok, but I would periodically have to adjust the direction of the antenna to keep most stations coming in clearly (I live 50-60 miles from most stations in our area).
MY TABLO SETUP - I set the tablo up directly in my attic - to keep the distance from antenna to tablo to a minimum. I ran ethernet cable willy nilly through 2 separate attic spaces to the router and then from the router to the two Fire TV units. The Tablo and hard drive are both in the attic with the antenna.
SO FAR - So far things are working great. My family has all acclimated to using it and recording different shows. The interface is better than I expected. My only complaint would be the load time - loading the tv listings and starting a show have a delay that is a little annoying - but the conveniences far outweigh that.
CHALLENGES / GLITCHES
Occasionally a show will stop while playing and give us an error. typically error 502, but sometimes something else. For live TV we can rewind 10 seconds and all is well. For a recording, backing out of the recording and re-starting it seems to fix it. This happens more often when we run both FireTV’s on Tablo simultaneously
FUTURE
In the future I plan to also reconnect the old antenna system to give us another option if the tablo were offline or if it was recording two programs and no tuner was available. We haven’t had much need for that yet though with 6 ppl in the house.
Your Tablo is in the attic? That doesn’t seem like a good idea. I get your reasoning, but man in the summer that sucker is going to overheat big time. Not to mention that if you ever need to reboot it you’re going to have to climb into the attic to do so.
I hadn’t really thought about the heat when setting it up; that’s a good point. It wouldn’t be that hard for me to move it to the opposite side of the ceiling on the second floor (basically a shelf on the wall right by the ceiling and a couple of cords running through a small hole).
I was amazed though that with just 6 feet of coax running to the tuner, I get every station I had before, plus on more and all with good signal - the 70 feet of coax I had running down to my crawl space was VERY lossy.
I wasn’t going to start a new thread but your title inspired me to share my ‘Satisfied Customer’ experience from Sunday: I was up early and watched all the pre-game stuff on ESPN and NFL Network thanks to Sling and Verizon and then tuned the Tablo in to watch the NBC pre-game while in the shower from the Android app. I just set the phone on the shelf above the tub. Worked great! Finished that up and into the living room. Passing the fridge, I checked the beer supply for the day (not enough) so off to the Jiffy Mart with phone and pre-game in hand. Got the beer and mobile Tablo didn’t miss a beat. Back home to the big screen to watch a huge win by my 'Hawks. Tablo was a definite bonus for playoff day!
Yes, make sure to get RG6, supposedly that is better for the signal. Also, an amplifier may work. My antenna and amp live in the attic with a short run to the utility room.