# TiVo Bolt no longer receiving any cable signal



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

Hello,

I have a TiVo Bolt I've been using for almost a year with Charter and haven't had any issues so far. My set up is pretty straightforward, I have the coax line coming into the house into a splitter. One split goes off to my cable modem, the other goes to a tuning adapter which then goes to the TiVo. Coax from the pole in my backyard all the way through my house is brand new, it was installed this year when I had Charter installed.

Anyhow, today I decided to try to organize the rats nest of cables behind my entertainment center, this involved temporarily disconnecting the TiVo and cable modem to move things around and organize them. After I was done, I reconnected everything. The cable modem came back online immediately, however, now, on the TiVo, every channel just says "Searching for signal", if I go into the Test Channel page, it shows zero signal. On the diagnostics page, the SNR keeps switching back and forth between 9, 15 and 20 dB which I know is too low, and the RS Uncorrected Count is skyrocketing.

I have tried almost everything. I've tried bypassing the splitter by going directly into the wall. I've tried bypassing the tuning adapter, I've tried swapping around coax cables, I've tried rebooting, I've tried removing and reinstalling the cable card. I've tried everything except calling Charter, because I know they'll tell me that if the cable modem's working, I have signal coming into the house, and the TiVo isn't their equipment and to screw off. Even the light on my tuning adapter is a solid yellow, and that thing will start flashing, indicating an error, if you look at it the wrong way.

The weird thing is, if I unplug the coax cable, it still alternates between 9, 15 and 20 dB for the SNR even though there's definitely no signal coming in, so shouldn't it be zero? The only thing that comes to mind is that it's dry here, and I was on carpet, and I inadvertently discharged static electricity on the coax connector earlier when messing with the cables and fried something, is that even a possibility? The other thing that came to mind is a service outage, but I've never seen TV not work while internet does, usually it's the other way around. And if TV were out, the local subreddit, DSL Reports and Twitter would be full of people complaining and I haven't seen any of that. I'm going to see if I can pick up a cable box from the local Charter office first thing on Monday to rule out a signal issue.

Any thoughts? Thanks!


----------



## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

t325 said:


> Any thoughts? Thanks!


A small thought. Plug the coax into your TV and run a channel scan. Even if the channels are encrypted (which they probably are), there might be a message that indicates either "no signal" or "cannot decode". If your TV has diagnostics (Sony usually does), you might get a signal level and SNR on a encrypted channel if you manually select it. Check the TV's channel list. If it's empty, change the cable feeding it. A whole number channel should not be entered since the TV will consider that to be an analog channel.

BTW, RS Corrected doesn't display a count on the Bolt or Roamio.


----------



## V7Goose (May 28, 2005)

Don't forget to actually check for the copper wire sticking out of the cable in the middle of the connector (all the connectors on all the cables) - sometimes that wire can break off (and get stuck in the receiving jack too!) - when that happens, you get no signal.


----------



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

JoeKustra said:


> A small thought. Plug the coax into your TV and run a channel scan. Even if the channels are encrypted (which they probably are), there might be a message that indicates either "no signal" or "cannot decode". If your TV has diagnostics (Sony usually does), you might get a signal level and SNR on a encrypted channel if you manually select it. Check the TV's channel list. If it's empty, change the cable feeding it. A whole number channel should not be entered since the TV will consider that to be an analog channel.
> 
> BTW, RS Corrected doesn't display a count on the Bolt or Roamio.


I plugged the coax into the TV and did a channel scan, it found one digital channel with some nonsense name on it, that didn't display anything. The TV's an older Vizio model, I couldn't find any diagnostics on it.

I did find an HD antenna laying around my house and plugged it into the Tivo, reran setup with the OTA option and it found a few channels and displayed them, so I guess that rules out the TiVo? I'm rerunning setup now with the cable coax attached, so if that doesn't work, I guess I'll call Charter who I'm sure won't be helpful at all, if they're even there Christmas morning.


----------



## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

t325 said:


> I plugged the coax into the TV and did a channel scan, it found one digital channel with some nonsense name on it, that didn't display anything. The TV's an older Vizio model, I couldn't find any diagnostics on it.
> 
> I did find an HD antenna laying around my house and plugged it into the Tivo, reran setup with the OTA option and it found a few channels and displayed them, so I guess that rules out the TiVo? I'm rerunning setup now with the cable coax attached, so if that doesn't work, I guess I'll call Charter who I'm sure won't be helpful at all, if they're even there Christmas morning.


The TiVo has two tuners. One for OTA and one for cable. As was posted, check the center wire. It may be too short for the TiVo. If the cable signal was dead, your TV would have found nothing. I forgot to ask, but have you checked that all four tuners are dead?


----------



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

JoeKustra said:


> The TiVo has two tuners. One for OTA and one for cable. As was posted, check the center wire. It may be too short for the TiVo. If the cable signal was dead, your TV would have found nothing. I forgot to ask, but have you checked that all four tuners are dead?


The coax wires look good, tried a couple different ones and no dice. All 4 tuners are dead. Like I said, the TV found something, but it was just one channel and no picture came in, the name it displayed for it was some sort of nonsense too. Should I have expected the channel search to find the hundreds of channels I'm supposed to receive, even if they are encrypted?

Is it possible I fried the tuner with static electricity when messing with it earlier? That's the only real theory I can come up with. Either that, or a very coincidentally timed service outage or hardware malfunction.


----------



## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

t325 said:


> The coax wires look good, tried a couple different ones and no dice. All 4 tuners are dead. Like I said, the TV found something, but it was just one channel and no picture came in, the name it displayed for it was some sort of nonsense too. Should I have expected the channel search to find the hundreds of channels I'm supposed to receive, even if they are encrypted?
> 
> Is it possible I fried the tuner with static electricity when messing with it earlier? That's the only real theory I can come up with. Either that, or a very coincidentally timed service outage or hardware malfunction.


It don't look good. I guess plan B. Get the company's box, unless somebody else has a better idea.


----------



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

JoeKustra said:


> It don't look good. I guess plan B. Get the company's box, unless somebody else has a better idea.


Yeah, that will be plan B I suppose. I just got off the phone with Charter, and their troubleshooting abilities for TiVos are limited, but they didn't have outage reports on their end.

It is my understanding the TiVo's under warranty for as long as I have service on it, with a $50 exchange fee, is that correct?


----------



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

Update: I picked up the cable box from Charter this morning, plugged it in to the same jack, with the same coax cable, and it works. Okay, so it must be the TiVo, right? Call TiVo, they insist the V52 error is a cable card issue. They get me on a 3 way call with Charter, who says there's an outage in my area, the conversation basically went like this:

Me: Why does my cable modem and Charter cable box work if there's an outage?
Charter: There can be an outage in just certain parts of the house, I can't explain why.
Me: This is the same part of my house. If I take the coax cable from the TiVo and plug it into your cable box, it works.
Charter: Outages can affect cable cards only.
Me: What time did the outage start?
Charter: 9:45 this morning
Me: This has been going on for a couple days
Charter: All I can tell you is there an outage and the system won't let me do anything or send a tech out.

They had a BS response for every point I brought up. The Charter person suggested I swap my tuning adapter and cable card, which I'll do later today, and I suppose if that doesn't work I'll call TiVo back. I hope swapping the cable card works, but I'm not optimistic.

At least I have a working cable box from Charter even if it is a non-DVR piece of junk, I was worried I might miss the Winter Classic.


----------



## gbertler (Feb 11, 2004)

On one of my Tivo Bolts, I was using it via OTA for a few weeks in my apartment. Had issues with one channel cutting in and out. Decided to get cable. The Bolt would only lock on to the lower frequency channels, giving me a V52 error. When I went to the Diagnostics page to check my signals, all the higher frequencies had an SNR that bounced from 9 to 21. I had the cable guy come out to check the signal to the outlet,high and low frequencies. He said everything was perfect, like in a lab. Called Tivo, and explained. Just waiting for a replacement to show up.


----------



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

Swapping the cable card and tuning adapter didn't work. Of course, I'm not 100% certain Charter paired it correctly when I called because the rep seemed clueless.

When I go to test channels during guided setup with the cable card, it says "No Channels Available", it won't let me type in a number manually either. Is that normal?


----------



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

Slight update: Another 3 way call between Charter and TiVo yesterday resulted in Charter sending out a technician. He spent a good hour and a half here today trying to get it to work, swapping out the cable card again with no luck. He tested the signal levels, those were all good. So I called TiVo back and the rep was still adamant that it was a Charter issue, but I insisted they exchange the TiVo. So 50 bucks later and a new one's on the way.


----------



## gbertler (Feb 11, 2004)

Just to let people know that if you take out the cablecard and put it back in, you may get no channels available for a few minutes while your cablecard gets the channel mapping. You can tell when a cablecard is successfully paired because in the host id screen, it will say something about "authorization received" on the bottom line of text.


----------



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

gbertler said:


> Just to let people know that if you take out the cablecard and put it back in, you may get no channels available for a few minutes while your cablecard gets the channel mapping. You can tell when a cablecard is successfully paired because in the host id screen, it will say something about "authorization received" on the bottom line of text.


TiVo support said I should see an "AUTH: Y" or something like that on one of those screens, but I never saw it. They said it was a pairing issue, however, between 3 cable cards, two calls to Charter, and a tech visit (and this guy knew what he was doing), I'm sure they were paired correctly, at least on Charter's end. I think if signal was dying somewhere in the tuner, it makes sense it would never have reached the cable card to activate, the V52 and lack of "AUTH: Y" may have been red herrings.

One thing the tech and I found odd was that the SNR was bouncing between 9 and 20 dB even when the coax was unplugged. Without any signal coming in, shouldn't SNR be zero?


----------



## JoeKustra (Dec 7, 2012)

t325 said:


> One thing the tech and I found odd was that the SNR was bouncing between 9 and 20 dB even when the coax was unplugged. Without any signal coming in, shouldn't SNR be zero?


You may live longer if you don't trust the diagnostic displays. When have you ever seen the RS Corrected higher than zero? RS Uncorrected can be in the billions, but that display works. I don't call them counters, since it's possible TiVo counts correctly. It just doesn't display correctly.


----------



## t325 (Feb 7, 2008)

I knew I was right all along despite TiVo insisting it was a Charter issue.

New box arrived, even before I called to pair the cable card during guided setup, I was able to get the basic cable channels in the test channels screen. After a call to Charter to pair it, I was getting premiums in test channels, and now I'm completing setup now. SNR was 30-something dB when I checked.

I'll now have full DVR capabilities during the Winter Classic. Crisis averted


----------



## dotparker (Oct 28, 2015)

t325 said:


> I knew I was right all along despite TiVo insisting it was a Charter issue.
> 
> New box arrived, even before I called to pair the cable card during guided setup, I was able to get the basic cable channels in the test channels screen. After a call to Charter to pair it, I was getting premiums in test channels, and now I'm completing setup now. SNR was 30-something dB when I checked.
> 
> I'll now have full DVR capabilities during the Winter Classic. Crisis averted


I want to thank you for posting your resolution. I believe you saved me hours of troubleshooting. I, too, was cleaning up cabling in the back of my Tivo and likely discharged some static electricity which fried the Bolt's transistor that processes the cablecard signal. My error message was also V52. My cable company could still communicate with the cablecard (so it wasn't them). So, I just ordered a new Bolt (cha-ching) to which I can apply my current subscription. If the new Bolt works, then I do believe that static (and a overly-sensitive transistor) was the culprit. I'll post again with the results.


----------



## aaronwt (Jan 31, 2002)

Especially this time of year it's a good idea to make sure any static build up is discharged before touching any components.


----------

