First of all, I have seven various brand televisions plus a four-tuner Tablo on a common distribution amplifier circuit served by an outdoor antenna.
Recently after working on my antenna system I rescanned channels on one of my TVs and was able to pick up a digital fringe station I had not received before. The signal was weak and possibly the propagation was especially good at the time, so I decided to scan channels on all my TVs and Tablo.
The results were only three TVs synced on the weak signal and the Tablo did not see it either.
What this tells me it can be a crap shoot if a customer is able to pick up a weak TV signal on a given TV and the Tablo does not. It could be the customer’s TV that syncs on the weak signal might have tuner characteristics similar to the three out of seven TVs at my house that did sync on the weak signal.
Some users may not even know the signal was weak if it comes in clearly and if the TV does not have signal strength reporting capability. At the time my TV reported the weak signal at about 15 on a scale of 100. Most other signals were above 70 on the same TV.
Bottom line one cannot always blame the Tablo for not picking up a TV channel that is viewable on a TV on the same antenna circuit.
Meanwhile I’m going to try a new antenna booster to see if I can get the weak signal station with more regularity and on more televisions.
Finally, I am a ham radio operator and we do like to experiment with antennas and sub-systems. It’s kinda in our blood.
You might not know the Tablo has an internal 4 way splitter, which explains why Tablo didn’t see it. I have gotten Houston TV in Austin when it is foggy.
I’m also a Ham. I got a Tech ticket when the code requirement was dropped.
I bought one of those stupid mud flap antennas. Recently the leaves on the trees came out and one station went from green to yellow on signal strength. I started looking into a new antenna then decided for giggles to re point that 19 dollar mudflap antenna. So I got some duct tape and angled it upstairs on the wall at a 45 degree angle. Now all is dark green and I’m one happy camper.
I may have missed it in the many threads, but it might help if the Tablo Techs responded if indeed there is any significant signal loss in the internal feed split to the 2/4 tuners. Perhaps the input impedance of the tuners is so high there is negligible signal loss among the tuners, or perhaps there is an internal preamp that makes up for the signal sharing.
I believe the long-held loss parameters of 3db on a two-way split and I believe a 7db loss on a 4-way split is based upon a circuit loading of a nominal 70 ohms, which is relatively quite large for low-level signal circuits at the end of a cable run. The signal division internal to the Tablo may not have such heavy impedance loading.
Curious people would like to know, for knowledge’s sake, if nothing else.
Wolfpack, you mentioned “new antenna booster”. I would like to hear more and would love a recommendation. I get more than 70 stations, but would gladly pay some bucks to pick up more. I typed “antenna booster” in the Amazon.com search bar and had 45,156 choices.
I have two antennae in my attic: one pointing east and one south. I know I lose some signal by having two antennae but I pick many more stations by doing this. I then combine the two antennae and feed them to my 7 TV’s and my Tablo. I have some sort of booster but it is not high end. So, what do you recommend?
HappyUser, I am not in a position to recommend an antenna amplifier. I recently order one with specs of 10db gain and two outputs to mate with my two 8-port distribution amps which only have a 3-db amplification per port. I have not received the amp yet. Google Eagle AM24DB.
Solid signal.com recently had a two antenna combiner amp on sale that might be a good match for your system. I’ll try to post a picture of the add below.
