The Tablo’s channel scan will display all channels your antenna is able to detect. It will also provide you with signal strength indicators.
One red dot:
You can expect video and audio break up in the channel’s stream, and it’s possible recordings will fail. If possible, try to improve your reception if you want to keep this channel in your Tablo’s lineup.
Three orange dots:
The video from this channel can be considered ’good’, with the occasional ‘blip’ in audio and video.
Five green dots:
The signal quality for channels with five green dots is considered excellent. There should not be any video or audio breakup in the stream.
What if your channels all have 5 green dots, but you’re still experiencing poor video quality?
You could be overdriving or over-amplifying your Tablo’s tuners and signal. This can happen if you’re using a low-grade, powerful amplifier attached to your already powerful antenna.
While amplifiers are good tools for boosting marginal reception losses, they can potentially harm the net quality of your signal by providing ‘false positives’. An amplifier will boost the SNR (signal to noise ratio) on both ends: the signal and the noise.
This can cause channels with dropped packets and poor quality to appear as a channel with five green dots.
In this scenario, the first step is to remove the amplifier, and begin troubleshooting your antenna without an interfering over-amplified signal.
You can find our article troubleshooting reception issues here.