Premiere XL4 wont get signal from FIOS.

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Before i decide to try and replace this thing... i have 2 Tivo Premieres, a regular 2 tuner, and the XL4. They were working fine, but recently started getting pixelization problems. wasn't sure if it was a failing splitter or what. Messing around with the splitter it seemed resolved, except my Premiere 2 was getting much higher signal strengths than my XL4. a bad channel would get 68-70 signal strength on the XL4 and skip sounds or pixelate every few seconds, while the other Tivo would have signal in the 80 on the same channel at the same time.

Then weirdness ensued. I tried putting the coax from outside directly with the coax to the Xl4 via an F connector and it wouldn't get any signal. So i put the splitter back on and it was as it was. Decided to try a signal amplifier (https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CYMQVG4) today. Plugged it all in, premiere 2 had a nice strong signal close to 90, but the XL4 was blank. No signal. Took out the amplifier and put the splitter back. Same thing. Tried putting the XL4 directly on the outside line, nothing.

Ended up taking the XL4 to the other room and plugged it into the coax of the Premiere 2, still nothing. Premier 2 still works fine. The XL4 just cant get a signal. menus and everything else works as normal, but it's like the coax isn't plugged in. Tivo support said the coax input must be dead (didn't offer me any other troubleshooting steps). I tried rerunning guided setup, but nothing. Took out M-card and reinserted. Nope.

So! anybody have thoughts?

if it IS dead, can i just take the drive from the XL4 and put it in the Premier 2? would like to put the 2TB drive to good use. Or maybe i'll just get a Bolt off of ebay and put it in there... how are the software tools these days? haven't done any drive upgrades in like 7 years.

 

Not sure how to tell with fios. This is what i see on both boxes in the cablecard menu in the cablecard pairing section. Makes you think its not but since the working box has this too, don't know how to tell.

 

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it's a motorola m card

 

Hm i thought it had more info than this when i looked at it last night before reseating

 

I concluded the tuner is dead on mine. Got a new m card from Verizon. Spent some time on the phone with tech support, activating and trying to get it to work. Would not work.

Ended up getting a Bolt off of ebay and it works fine with the existing card and has a stronger signal strength in the same spot the xl4 was in. Getting 90 on channels the xl4 was getting 68 or less.

At least I'm able to keep it up and running so i transferred over my recordings to the new one.

Question now is what to do with the old one. Repurpose the 2tb drive or try to get something on ebay for it. Not seeing a big market for old premieres. I didn't realize when i bought the bolt that they use 2.5" laptop drives so the old drive wont go into the new tivo.

 

Yeah, i downgraded the bolt to te3. Really straightforward and easy. Wish I'd done that before letting my mini upgrade because now it wont downgrade or work with a te3 TiVo.

 

care to share your experience in how you did it? lots of us have not had success no matter how much we try. Since Nov seems like some update was made to TE4 that has prevented the downgrade. Check out this thread, and if you can offer help, please share here:
Trying to Move Mini from TE4 host to a TE3 Host