Amazon Fire TV Recast

I pre-ordered my recast back in October 2019, and I've had it for over a year now. In that year, I've *really* wanted to like the Recast. I really enjoy a lot of Amazon's product. But this product is really lacking in many ways. I've been telling myself over the past year that Amazon will come out with an update soon to fix some of the problems, but that hasn't happened, and at this point, I'm pretty sure it is not going to happen. It is possible the Recast may fill your needs, and make you happy, but you should be aware of its limits. 1) Probably the most significant problem with the Recast is the tuner. It doesn't work very well, or at least not on channels physically using RF channel 13 in the VHF-Hi band. You can see my attached image. This whole year I've been having problems with WJZ-TV CBS 13 in Baltimore, 11 miles away, transmitting currently on RF channel 13 (scheduled to move to 12 in 2020). To diagnose the problem, I put a splitter directly before my recast, and hooked one output to the recast, and the other to a small, cheap, and rather old Toshiba TV. This way I could watch the over the air signal, and the Recast at the same time, or at least within a few seconds of each other. As I'm watching, I can see the recast keep getting distorted, and popping up the "weak or no signal" popup, while the TV below displays no visual defects at all. I can swap the cables between the TV and the recast, and they still behave the same. Pulling up the signal meter on the small tv, as shown in the picture, the signal is strong, with a high SNR (Which is a good thing no matter what the engineers at TiVo who failed information theory say. Yes, I'm a Computer engineer, and I specialize in communications systems. I'm not an expert, but I understand what eb/n0 and the Shanon limit are.). So, here's the first problem. Recast is *LYING* to you. The signal is not too weak, in fact, it's actually too strong. The "weak or no signal" message merely indicates the Recast is receiving bit errors. That can be caused by too strong or to weak a signal. *usually* too weak is the problem, unless you live right next to a tower or you've got a badly designed receiver. Now, the antenna feed I'm using is an Antennas direct 2Max. In the VHF band, this is just a dipole, with a meager 2.6dBi of gain. This is not a high power antenna, and I do not have an amplifier, it's just cabled with RG6 quad from my attic to my basement. In order to get the recast to receive correctly without "weak" signal, I had to stick 30dB of attenuation inline (27dB was not enough). That may not sound like much, but 30dB means I had to divide the signal down to be 1/1000th the strength it is coming off my antenna. It's also enough loss that all but the strongest channels in the area start to drop out. Sure, strong signals can be a real problem, but in this case, it is the Recast that is the problem. I have connected 4 different TVs from 3 different manufacturers (Toshiba, Sony, Panasonic) to that same antenna feed. All receive channel 13 crystal clear, without any glitches or distortion using their built in tuners. Also, WBAL-TV 11 transmits from the same hilltop in Baltimore 11 miles away at 26.6 kW, only slightly less than WJZ's 33.8kW. The Recast has no issue with it at all. Despite the small transmit power differences, (there's less than 1.1dB of difference) the Recast needs to have the signal cut down by a factor of 1000 (or 30dB) to receive without clipping its input. Sorry, with 4 other tuners working just fine on the exact same antenna feed, at the exact same signal level... That's a bad RF front-end design that isn't working well at the upper end of the VHF band. 2) The recast can only be viewed from Fire TVs devices, as well as pretty much any tablet or phone. They do not support viewing from PC, or FireTV competitors like Roku. This is something I'm actually quite OK with. I bought the product knowing about this limit, and given the slight price advantage it has over competitors like Tablo, I feel a bit of "vendor lock in" is OK. I'm still OK with it, but you should be aware. 3) The integration with Fire TV devices is really quite clunky. Getting to recently watched channels off the main screen is fine, and getting to your recordings off the dvr menu is pretty quick too. Getting to the guide is mildly quirky, and it shouldn't be.. You scroll down to the row of "On Now" items on the main screen, then click left, and a magic extra item appears where you can hit the guide. You can also get to it a few other places, but it is a little quirky. This really should be quick, easy, and not at all hidden item. Where it is seriously lacking is setup and management interface. While they have made some improvements to the channel management interface it is still quite rudimentary. Originally the "channel management" would only display the broadcast network.. "CBS", "ABC", etc. They finally have added a display of what channel number an station callsign it is. This is really helpful where I live, because I am between markets and there are two "CBS" channels. Thank you Amazon for fixing one thing. That said, the channel management really lacks a decent interface for providing you signal level feedback. It is just "Signal strength: good", unless it is so bad the image has visual defects, when it becomes "Signal strength: poor". There's nothing in between from what I can tell. This compounds the problems with the broken tuner. There's no useful feedback here other than "good" and "so bad you already know it from looking at the picture". Come on Amazon, would it hurt to put a signal meter in? Or at least a numeric BER display, I know you are measuring that much. To add insult to injury, when you try to set up recordings on channels that break up sometimes, like say, channel 13 on mine, it will tell you "This channel has a history of signal problems". But the channel management doesn't tell you this. I just tells you channel 13.1 is "good". Clearly the recast is keeping tabs of signal quality over time.. how about showing that somewhere? For the DVR setup, I can go into scheduled recordings to see the upcoming shows that are going to be recorded. However, the only spot it will show me the full list of things I have setup as series to record, but aren't on the air right now, is in the "priority" menu. In this menu I can delete series settings for off-air shows, but it can't tell me much about how it was set up. There's no obvious "series recording manager" anywhere. Sorry Amazon, substandard hardware, clumsy integration into your product line, and almost no setup utilities whatsoever mean this product isn't ready to be released. I'm probably going to be replacing it with a Tablo. So, the final part is entirely my fault. I should have paid serious attention to the problems with the Recast hardware sooner. But, I had a busy year, and it was only recently that I was able to diagnose the tuner flaws. For a long time I was telling myself there had to be a wiring or antenna issue, since it was just one channel. Since it is well beyond the return window now, I'm stuck with a partially defective, incomplete product that feels like it was rushed to market, and even 1 year later still feels like something that is a beta release. If you ever get your product ready for market, let me know, maybe I'll dig it out and plug it in just to see if it is anywhere near as capable as the competition. Or even functions correctly. Sure, RF circuitry is hard to get right, particularly things that cover a large bandwidth. But you are Amazon, and TVs with good front ends have been around for decades. Your products should work and tune correctly. edit: It would appear others are having the same issue: https://www.amazonforum.com/forums/devices/fire-tv/496091-issues-with-vhf-channel-13 Seems some similar products had an issue with the firmware for the demodulator, but who knows if that holds true in the recast.