"Weak or No Signal" Message when watching Antenna Channels with Fire TV Recast

"Weak or No Signal" Message when watching Antenna Channels with Fire TV Recast

Some customers report seeing a "Weak or No Signal" message when watching live Antenna channels or a recorded program on the Fire TV Recast.  If this is accompanied by channel break-up or pixelation, or it happens frequently in the middle of a program, it's possible you do have a problem with the antenna reception or wiring. If this is seen without any other symptoms, then it is just a false positive message, and can be ignored. A "blurry" or "fuzzy" picture is not a symptom of an antenna signal strength problem but more likely a network or WiFi problem.

You can read in this forum that many users seem to complain about the Amazon Fire TV Recast giving this pop-up message when having no problems with their reception. If it really bothers you, we suggest contacting Amazon and telling them your reception is fine, but you keep getting this pop-up message and you want to disable it.  The more people that complain about it, the more likely it is they will fix the issue.

Nerd alert! If you are curious about why we believe so many customers see this message, read on...

Our working theory without having access to the Recast programming is that the tuner has a delay when locking on to a signal.  This is normal since antenna signals bounce all over the place, and the tuner needs a second or two to decide which signal is the strongest. Most TVs just have a short delay when locking and do not display a message about the signal strength while locking. The Recast doesn't seem to take any longer than other devices when locking.  We believe the Recast displays this message in error while the tuner is in the process of locking onto a signal, since there is no signal before the lock. It's a programming/timing issue.  Perhaps it takes 1.5 seconds to lock on to a signal, but the programming says to display the message after 1 second. This can happen when changing channels manually, or when recording a program and the Recast had to change channels to record. The result is this message flashes at the beginning of the program, goes away, then the program is fine.  It gives you a false sense of a signal problem when there is none.

In the end, this is just a theory, but from our experience and from listening to customers, it's a reasonable guess.