Sometimes it's the broadcast tower at fault

Today, while watching one of the CBS subchannels, I suddenly lost the signal. A quick check of all CBS subchannels showed all of them gone, unfortunately,. I checked my other antenna with the same result. Then I pulled out my reserve rabbit ears with no luck. All other channels I receive were present. I then did a quick search to see if the broadcast tower had been reported as offline, and couldn’t find anything. So, I called the station and asked if they were down. The receptionist told me they took a lightning hit last night and had been running on backup. they told her they had to take it down to do the repairs, and it would only be about 5 minutes, bu tan hour and a half later, still nothing. Hopefully, it will be back by primetime, but I just wanted to post this to show that it’s not always the fault of the Tablo, or the antenna. Sometimes, it’s something beyond our control.

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Just got CBS back! Now I won’t miss Big Brother tonight.

Yep, our local CBS had a transmitter failure 2 weeks ago. Took them 3 days to get it back up at 50% power. No ETA for full strength. With it running at 50%, It works OK after dark ( a few glitches but watchable) but nothing during the day… Hoping they get it fixed before fall season starts!!!

That’s an excellent point @lkahhan

If there’s a sudden outage or even a sudden loss of audio but not video on a single channel (or series of channel/subchannels) we can often track this back to the broadcast source.

The best way to figure this out is to take the steps you did, and/or do a channel rescan.

Sometimes a parameter has changed and rescan will allow the Tablo to find the signal again, but sometimes it’s a problem that the broadcast must fix themselves.