Today’s question is from Stan who asks, “Why am I not able to access my local NBC channel? Tablo is able to pick up other channels coming from that same tower.”
It can be super frustrating when your new antenna TV setup just doesn’t seem to pick up one of your local channels, no matter how many times you rescan. Thankfully, with a little bit of research and some tweaks to your setup, this semi-common issue can be overcome.
There are four main reasons why your Tablo may not be able to pick up a channel that should be within range of your TV antenna:
1 – The channel is broadcast on the VHF spectrum
This is likely Stan’s issue. While most antenna TV channels in the United States are broadcast on the UHF spectrum, a handful are still broadcast on VHF.
A TV antenna with longer elements is required to pick up the longer wavelengths of these broadcasts and many of today’s compact indoor antennas just aren’t designed for this.
Switching to a more traditional ‘rabbit ears’ style indoor antenna, or a larger outdoor antenna with a specialized VHF element like the one pictured above may be required.
2 – Your TV antenna is receiving too much signal from this channel
Yes, your TV signal strength can be too strong!
Just like watering petunias with a power washer gives a poor result, sending too strong of a signal from your TV antenna to your Tablo can overload the tuners causing the signal to be intermittent or simply unavailable.
This can happen if you live very close to your local broadcast towers, or you are using too powerful of an antenna for your location.
Disabling Tablo’s in-line amplifier, switching to an unamplified antenna and/or adding an attenuator can help.
3 – Your TV antenna isn’t receiving enough signal from this channel
Even if you’re able to pick a channel up on your TV, the signal may be slightly too weak for Tablo to see it.
Unlike your single-tuner television, the signal from your TV antenna is split between two or four tuners in Tablo. The device’s in-line amplifier does mitigate the signal loss, but channels on the edge of visibility may fall off the ‘digital cliff’.
Moving your TV antenna to a higher location with better line-of-sight can help, but switching to a more powerful antenna is a better bet.
4 – The channel is broadcasting in a non-standard format
With very few exceptions, broadcast television is delivered in MPEG-2 video format.
However, as stations start experimenting with the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard, there’s often not enough frequency bandwidth available to continue broadcasting all their ATSC 1.0 stations which they must do by law.
As a result, a handful have switched some ATSC 1.0 broadcasts to MPEG-4 which is more efficient so stations can fit more channels on the same broadcast frequency.
While the 4th generation Tablo can decode these thanks to a firmware update, unfortunately, legacy Tablo devices are not currently designed to pick up MPEG-4-based broadcasts.
Have a question about watching TV that you’d like answered? Send us a note and you may see your question on the Tablo blog and in an upcoming issue of our newsletter, Stay Tuned!
