Still no troubles here @MaryM. You know, the whole 8VSB transmission scheme is kind of poor. I’ve never really seen any case where an indoor antenna was completely acceptable. Perhaps mostly acceptable, but that’s about as good as I’ve seen it. I’m only about 10 miles from the major transmitters in my area. And the Houston area is pretty flat, so you might think that transmitters at 2000 feet would work great, but it’s just not that great. In the days of analog TV, I could pick up the locals just about anywhere, I remember that some retail stores would even display TVs using rabbit ears inside the store, and it worked pretty good. Not prefect, but good enough, because lots of people used to watch TV that way.

But then as now, range ratings on antennas are almost meaningless. Just because an antenna is rated for 50 miles, that certainly doesn’t mean that it will receive all stations at that range. That is true of outdoor antennas, and even more so of indoor antennas. I have experimented with all kinds of indoor antennas, both amplified and not. I even have one of the Philips Silver Sensor antennas that were so highly-touted at one time. It’s probably still the best of the lot, but in my experience, no indoor antenna performs as well as an outdoor antenna, all else being equal. That’s just physics.

Add to that the fact that the 8VSB standard just doesn’t handle multi-path very well. It can deal with static reflections, like reflections off of building and such, but if a tree blows in the wind, it all falls apart. Some receivers do a better job than others, and I have to say that Tablo’s receivers are among the best I have tried, but even so, an indoor antenna is still challenging. And Tablo doesn’t really give us the tools we need to get the best antenna positioning either, so that adds to the challenge. I actually used my HDHomeRun to tune my antenna, because it has a pretty good near-real-time signal strength and signal quality app for iOS.

In my testing, I noticed that Tablo’s receivers are a bit more tolerant of overload than, say, the ones on my Hauppauge WinTV-7164 tuner card in my home theater PC. But they still work better when they’re not overloaded, so if you are very close to the transmitters, and you are using an amplified antenna, you might actually get better results by reducing the gain. In my system, I have an outdoor antenna with an antenna-mounted amplifier. That helps with feedline losses and EM ingress, but even after some splits, it was still too much signal for the Hauppauge tuners. So I started adding inline attenuators until I observed the best signal quality (as opposed to the strongest signal). I like the Pico Macom PPFAM In-Line Attenuators, but there are other good brands too like.Channel Master and Winegard. Look for a seller that doesn’t try to hide shipping costs by rolling it into the price of the product. They should be around $2 each and a handful of different values can all ship together for the same cost as shipping one.

Figuring out the best amount of attenuation (if any) is easy to do with the Hauppauge software, and even easier with the HDHomeRun app, but I found it just about impossible with the Tablo. So lacking better information, I just used the same attenuation for the Tablo that I used with the HDHomeRun. That resulted in more reliable reception via Tablo than with any other tuner that I own. I don’t know how to tell anyone to replicate my method though. You just need some way to observe both signal strength and signal quality in real time, while making changes to the antenna position and gain. Perhaps you have a TV that lets you see what needs to be seen. If so, you could use that as a basis for Tablo. The Tablo tuners are very good, if you can figure out how to tune your antenna.

It’s good that you hard-wired your Tablo. And 802.11ac has great potential, although it’s less clear as to whether one would get the most useful features, such as beam-forming, while using the Trendnet/Roku combination.

Still, 20 feet is pretty close. Do you have other Wi-Fi devices in close proximity to Roku stick and/or Tablo? This is another case where some software tools would be very helpful. I just haven’t found any good way to evaluate the connection between a Tablo and a wireless client. It would be nice if the Roku stick had an Ethernet port, but alas it does not, so there is no way to rule out wireless networking problems.

I can say that the Roku stick does not support “ac”, so the connection would be 802.11n at best. But the Roku stick does support dual-band, so if you are running your router in single-band mode, it might be worthwhile to enable the 5GHz band as well.

You mentioned that there is no correlation to weather, but for what it’s worth, as a long time Ham Radio operator, I can tell you that there are things that affect signal propagation that one can’t necessary see. And in the case of 8VSB, things moving in the signal path can have a dramatic impact on reception. The type of antenna you have is known as a “patch” antenna. All patch antennas are directional to some extent, so you might have better luck with a different orientation. An old Ham radio trick is to point the antenna upward, as that reduces ground effect and noise (and other things in the context of Ham Radio), so you might try an upward angle. If you don’t have the antenna in a window, it may help to put it there.

It would also help you to know the physical location of the transmitters relative to your location. In other words, if the transmitters are to the east, it’s probably not going to help much to put the antenna in a west-facing window. And a north-facing window might be even worse, because it would put the entire length of the wall between the transmitter and the antenna.

If you can find a way to see both signal quality and signal strength in real time, that will help a lot with deciding how to position the antenna. Otherwise, it’s going to be an educated guess at best. If you have to guess, then find out where the transmitters are by using something like antennaweb.org, then try to put the antenna so that there is as little of your building in the way as possible. Most antennas work better if there is nothing in their near field, so unless you can actually mount in on a window, try to move it away from objects, and particularly metal objects.

It is not uncommon to find metal construction in the walls of apartments, so it might help to move the antenna away from the walls. If it’s a modern building, it may also have low-E window glass, and the same thing that stops IR radiation also stops RF from easily passing through low-E glass. 1byone makes a stand for the antenna, so that might be an option for you. If none of that works, then something like the Silver Sensor, or Terk’s amplified version may work better for you. It’s more obtrusive than the patch antenna, but it’s also more directional, so that may help you. And you can always treat it as sculpture.

Thinking back, I did a lot of Ham Radio operation in my apartment days, although the management was kind enough to allow me to clamp my antenna mast to the balcony railing. I don’t know what your situation is, but maybe you can figure a way to get your TV antenna outside, in a spot that faces the transmitters…(?) There is a federal ruling that allows the installation of DBS satellite dishes just about anywhere, and I have seen some TV antennas that are designed to look like a DBS dish. If your neighbors have dishes, that could be another option for you.