tale of two tivos

July 19, 2008 11:07 AM

Tivo question about 2 boxes in same house, sucking off the same cable line teat, but 1 is getting some channels that the other doesn't.

My wife has a series 1 thats still hooked up to our land line phone service. My series 2 is hooked up to our wireless network. Her Tivo gets 2 basic channels that my unit suddenly decided not to receive anymore.

What gives?

posted by ducktape to technology (6 comments total)

"Not receive", as in "I can tune to them, but I just get static"? Or "not receive" in that "they dropped off Tivo's list of channels I can watch/record"?
posted by LairBob at 11:42 AM on July 19, 2008

They are on the list, but when I try to tune in I get the "Searching for signal" blue box. This has been going on for at least a month. Thats one hell of a long search.
posted by ducktape at 11:47 AM on July 19, 2008

99% chance it's a signal strength issue, unless they're DirecTV TiVos. Swap the locations of the two boxes temporarily and see what happens.
posted by wierdo at 12:03 PM on July 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

If you have any unused cable outlets (free coaxial ends), make sure they're capped with a terminator. This often is enough to resolve signal strength issues. If not, your cable company can sometimes help if they know about the problem.
posted by ikkyu2 at 3:29 PM on July 19, 2008

if you do wierdo's test and it is in fact a signal strength issue, you might go have a look at the outside of your house and find the splitter where the two lines diverge. i once lived in a house that had a 1-in/3-out cable splitter, where the 3 outputs were 50%, 25% and 25% power, respectively.

i still don't understand why one would want that kind of asymmetry, but i'm sure there's some reason. anyway, it's possible you have such a setup, which can be resolved by replacing the 3-way with a 50/50 2-way splitter.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 7:43 PM on July 19, 2008

i still don't understand why one would want that kind of asymmetry

I don't know all the technical reasons behind it, but at my work we use the lower power outputs for shorter cable runs, where the loss in power didn't matter.
posted by shinynewnick at 8:24 PM on July 19, 2008