Bolt's crappy OTA tuners

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I have been dealing with my Bolt's apparently crappy OTA tuners for a couple years. I'm really close to the antennas for our area (I can see both from my backyard) and I put an overkill UHF antenna outside because it was easy to do and I split the signal 8 ways once it gets into the house, then most of those get split again (e.g. direct to TV, and to a TiVo).

Anyway, after much futzing I got a digiair pro atsc signal meter and it revealed something interesting - if a signal is greater than 0 dBmV, the TiVo will pixelate. Apparently its built-in attenuator can't handle really strong signals. Anyway, I've played with attenuators and selective attenuators and finally ended up just turning the antenna slightly to keep the top two channels at less than 0 dBmV at the TiVo. Great. Except now a 3rd channel (physical channel 11, at -3dBmV) is screwing up, and adding attenuation isn't working.

So maybe this is multi-path, maybe interference, but every other tuner in the house (multiple TVs, and an HDHomeRun) don't have any issues on ANY stations, no matter what direction the antenna is pointed.

I feel like I'm babying this one crappy TiVo tuner and I'm kinda done with it. My family doesn't really use the TiVo anymore and I only use it once a week during football season. I have Plex DVR setup, but it has its own issues, like 30-second skip on a Fire Stick has jittery playback for 0-2 seconds afterward. I don't really want a monthly subscription so Channels DVR is out.

I'm loathe to spend more money on this setup, but are there any TiVos with known-better tuners? I have the TCD849000, are any of the OTA-only TiVos any better?

And yes, I've pulled my TiVo apart to check the ground on the coax is still in place.

 

I looked at that, but the station having issues is low frequency (VHF 11 - 201Mhz), and LTE is channels 38-50 (700mhz+).

 

I ordered a (Philips) LTE filter. I don't have high hopes, but it can't hurt for $10.

 

The station having issues on the TiVo shows 94% signal strength, 100% signal quality and 100% symbol quality on my HDHomeRun. But a different station that is reporting slightly stronger in the Digiair pro is showing 90/100/100. A definite lower signal channel is showing 68/100/100, so it seems to be a decent proxy for the signal strength as reported by the Digiair. Which one is more accurate? Hard to tell.

 

Yes, strength/signal quality/symbol quality, the order in the app and documentation.

 

Unfortunately, the LTE filter made no difference. I left it on the line (and removed my MoCA filter, as it is redundant) anyway.

 

I'm going to try moving the antenna, and maybe building my own. The one I have is very directional which isn't great because the three antennas in the area are all in significantly different directions. The main two are 90 degrees apart from each other and the 3rd is 180 in the other direction entirely. They're all close enough that I can pick them all up no matter what direction the antenna is pointing, but signal strength varies quite a bit when turning it. Also, the antenna is mounted on an old satellite TV mast stuck in the ground on the side of the house. One of the big antennas is straight through my neighbor's house, and our house is aluminum siding. I suspect some of this is messing things up. I'm thinking a DIY bowtie, fractal or omnidirectional loop antenna with no reflector stuck in the middle of the back yard may be better.

 

I don't have a weak signal though. I have to have a 10dB attenuator an 8-way and a 2-way splitter on the signal just to get the signal below 0dBmV. I may be confusing signal strength with quality, but they are certainly related, no?

 

So maybe a little background would help. When cutting the cord, I wanted an outdoor antenna for reliability, away from interference of devices in the house, etc. At the time I had 3 TiVos (series 3s) and was using my coax for MoCA too. Between the MoCA, TVs and TiVos, I had 7 or 8 points in the house that needed connections, and some of those points was again split three ways - a TV for direct tuning, a TiVo, and a MoCA adapter. The line comes from outside and goes into an 8-way splitter in the basement (-11dB), and each splitter at the branch locations subtracted 3.5dB, so another 3.5 to 7dB loss. Without taking into account the coax itself, that's 18dB loss. I knew this was non-trivial loss, I really didn't want to get onto the roof, and the two major transmitters in the area were 90 degrees apart, so I got a completely overkill antenna and put it on the previous owner's DirectTV pole in the backyard, put new ends on the existing coax, pointed each half roughly at the antennas, and hooked it into the house's coax, and I was able to draw in every station on every TV and TiVo perfectly. This worked for years, until TiVo basically forced me to replace the Series 3 TiVos with a single Bolt and a few TiVo minis. That's when I started having problems with one particular station. After much futzing I eliminated half of that DB8e essentially turning it into this antenna, and still needed attenuators and noticed the Bolt had issues with any station above 0dBmV (I also noted that it cuts out entirely around -24dBmV). Some more futzing and repointing along with an additional 10dB attenuator on the line and all stations are right below 0dBmV at the same splitter the TiVo is connected to. The previous stations that were having issues for being too strong are no longer having issues, but a different station (measured at -3dBmv) is still having issues.

Yes, it is still an overkill directional antenna, mounted 4' off the ground on a pole rather than the roof or attic, and probably too close to the aluminum siding of our house and maybe blocked by the neighbors for one antenna.

I do have plans to make my own much smaller antenna, something like the OA-432, experiment with mounting options (middle of the yard away from the house, up a tree, on the roof, etc) and see if I can pull in a signal strong enough to still feed the whole house without an amplifier. I'm just waiting for a balun to arrive. I may end up with the thing mounted inside, barely above grade in my basement between the rafters, particularly since we just got snow and then a cold snap..

To complicate things, there is a 3rd antenna with a much weaker signal in a completely different direction from the other two I would also like to pull in, but it isn't one of the major networks so I could do without.

 

Yes, I could probably stick a piece of wire into my Bolt and get decent reception on the strongest stations but then the Bolt couldn't connect to MoCA and the TiVo minis couldn't connect to it, Yes, I hook up an external MoCA/Ethernet adapter to the Bolt and solve that problem too. I'm guessing the weaker stations in the area wouldn't work or at least wouldn't work reliably. Then I have two antennas, one directly into the Bolt and another (still outside) for everything else in the house, and the one inside would be subject to people walking around, phones, Wifi, the microwave and whatever else leaks RF.

Tuners have built-in attenuators to handle strong signals just fine, it just seems that the Bolt's is particularly crappy and sensitive to other issues (multipath?) that none of the other tuners I have (Panasonic TVs, a Samsung TV, HD HomeRun, even a crappy Homeworx thing) seem to have trouble with.

 

And yes, I realize I've overengineered it and caused my own problems here.