GREAT report. Keep that test tv, it’s an invaluable tool. Pixelating indicates loss of sync with a fast recovery.
It’s disturbing that the Tablo shows full strength but I understand how that can happen if they display the highest signal level instead of an average or minimum.
That’s something for Tablo to look into.
How far are u from the antenna farm?
I don’t think the Tablo has a signal meter, period. I think the green dots just show an OTA channel has been found.
When experimenting this past week with location and antennas, even if a station would only come in blips, there were 4 green dots next to it. @KimchiGUN having that extra TV around is a necessary tool regardless. Would there not be too long of a delay between the Tablo recognizing the signal and the screen feedback? It would definitely be a useful tool, but I’ve seen full strength channels give poor performance when the antenna is then connected to the puck.
It’s a nightmare for users that have never used an antenna at their place and aren’t sure where to start. Setting up one at my Mom’s involved scanning until I got every channel, then moving the antenna in incremental bursts while playing live TV and watching for signal loss.
Pixelation can also result from multipath interference, which unfortunately 8VSB modulation is very sensitive to. Signal strength can be very high, but it gives no indication about any multipath issues. This can be particularly problematic with omnidirectional indoor antennas.
KimchiGUN and Neil1 thanks for sharing. 
I don’t know about 4th Gen. Tablos but my 2nd and 1st gen. units show 3 orange dots for some channels.
That’s interesting. Wonder what’s going on on the 4th for that.
I never get above 75% signal on any station when checking other devices, so I know it’s not fully green. The attached antenna goes from 1 to 2 dots out of 4 at best, so overall, it seems like nothing has a great sense of how powerful a signal is!
Loving these first-world problems!
I am 14 miles away. Here’s the kicker. I have a server rack in my man cave that’s on the 1st floor of my home. The living room where the Tablo APP is being used is on the 2nd floor. I set it up in my man cave, and I assumed the 3 dots meant full signal. I wanted my Tablo Gen4 to plugged into my core switch. My wife didn’t want a flat antenna on the living room wall, you know? It would make things look “ugly”. Tech Geek having a Non-Tech Geek Wife. LOL.
To @269587 … I assumed the 3 dots were a signal meter. I didn’t see anywhere it said it wasn’t. I guess that’s what I get for assuming. The more I look at it, I see what you are saying about it. It seems more like a YES, there is a channel there. Nothing more.
@wkh - I agree with you, I understand that. I appreciate the input there. It seems like when the weather is clear, I’m ok. Recently we’ve had tons of rain and wind. Those are the days the recordings / APP has been acting up. My antenna isn’t in a window… Just on the wall.
Eventually today, I will move my Tablo upstairs to my living room entertainment center. I got the wife’s approval after she had some bad recordings. I have a switch in the entertainment center cabinet. It will be plugged into that. I did run a quick test with my small test TV in the living room with the tablo antenna, it does show full bars. My top floor sits above the tree line and highway wall.
Maybe we should start a post with ugly wall antenna setups. That’s about all you can do in the city!
IDK what the green dots are for, I assumed like everyone it was for signal strength. I very recently start thinking it was just noting that it was an OTA, but we have so little information regarding the inner workings of our Tablos and their respective apps.
I wish you luck in your endeavor today, and hopefully you can find a way to make that antenna a little more aesthetically pleasing to your wife. Funny how we choose functionality over appearance for setup, but want the reverse within an app…
I can easily suspect that you need a better place for your antenna. Getting only one bar on the test tv surely indicated marginal signal strength. The signal should be stronger with you being 14 miles from the transmitters unless the transmitters are low power.
Go to
enter your zip code in the Address box. select the Put The Coordinates in. The coordinates will fill in the box below, then select find towers. A locater map of the towers will come up and the listing of all channels is below.
I like this list because it shows the transmitter power of each transmitter.
I live 35-45 miles from the high power megawatt transmitters and only 13 to 25 miles from the low power, less that 15kw transmitters. I had to add a 23db amplifier between my antenna and the Tablo just to get enough signal strength thru the house that is on a slightly higher elevation. I can pick up the high power transmitters but the low power transmitters still evade me.
The Legacy Tablo does give usable signal strengths. For example, when I see pixelation on a TV station and go do a rescan, that station has usually gone from 4 green dots to 3 amber dots. So I know it’s time to move my antenna :-). Since all the stations that I want are now the full green dots on the Legacy Tablo, and there was no pixelation on the 4th gen Tablo, I didn’t pay much attention to the dots on the 4th gen. They were all green on the scans on the 4th gen Tablo as well, though.
By the by, I’ve been wanting a way to measure TV station signal strength for optimizing antenna positioning for a long time now…I’ve seen some, but haven’t gotten one yet. Need to get some recommendations to find a signal strength meter that really works. The “Antenna Man” has recommended a couple on his channel, might get one of those. Obviously not my top priority.
I hadn’t tried that. I had just went off of what was already scanned because I knew the channels existed. It seems like a lot of extra work, needing to rescan just to check to see how well a signal is coming in. I had treated it like a live meter. Thanks for the idea for next time!
I don’t believe it would take much for Tablo to provide a means to point the antenna. Allow us to select a single channel with the signal strength on the screen updating at 2 or 3 second intervals while the antenna is moved for the best signal.
Unfortunately I don’t think there are many tech geek wives out there.
My wife gave up on me over 50 years ago and decided to live with it. She kept me around which means there is hope with a little bit of patience and compromise.
Tablo firmware 2.2.48, Ethernet connected (not WiFi).
Roku Ultra 4802x OS version 12.5.5. Tablo app 0.8.401
Tablo live channel view is fine on IoS devices. All other Roku channels are fine.
I see others have the same issue.
What’s the story Tablo? Lets get a fix together please otherwise the unit will be returned.
Thank you
I am frustrated by the same issue. I was looking forward to enjoying my new Tablo but have yet to be able to watch it on Roku for more than 5 minutes at a time!
Aye to that. The Roku/Tablo combination is unusable.
Green diot is good, yellow fair, red bad. But it is just a moment in time while scanning. It doesn’t update until scan again
There are people who will try to record shows that are in the Yellow and Red and think because the Tablo picked up the channel and it was stored they can get a great recording.
I would advise that is a fools errand and unless a channel is showing green don’t expect a good recording!
I am debating on a return to amazon before my return period expires. If they don’t get the problem fixed soon, there may be a lot of returns. You will start seeing these at resellers like Bargain Hunt soon. LOL.
I had not expected to need to rescan every time to find the signal strength, assuming this was a live signal (which looking back makes no sense since it can’t process every station at the same time with only two tuners!)
And I understand @Lenlabnj reminding people to be careful when recording on stations that does not have the full green meter, but they were green every time I’ve scanned. It’s a very backwards system, and likely one I won’t rely on. All my stations are very close, so if they pop in at all, I know I just need to move the antenna in small increments to find the best spot. For me, playing the station live is the most helpful way to see what’s going on.
As for the 4 green dots, same thing when setting up the one at my mom’s. 2 stations weren’t coming in right, but they were green all the way. So weird.
As a test just now, though, I unplugged the amplifier and rescanned. I’m happy to report that I did have channels in a lesser green, yellowish 3 dot bar and not all 4 green dots.
I can’t explain why this is happening today when none of this happened last weekend while I was swapping out antennas and moving my entire setup around! I had to perform upwards of 20 channel scans since I would get the subchannels on one but not the main – I’d never seen that before!
I’m just going to chalk it up to more odd behavior for the two devices that received the two 2.2.48 firmware updates. (The day that second firmware updated was the day I started having all my signal problems.)
I perform a channel scan every other day (at least) to check on those stations missing guide data (as well as two FAST that aren’t correct). In none of those did the colors ever change. Thanks for inspiring me to try again.