When you experience annoying signal drops or interference when you’re trying to listen to your car radio, then there’s a pretty good chance it was caused by something that you can’t really do anything about.
Depending on whether you’re trying to tune into your favorite talk show on the AM band, or listen to some music on the FM band, anything from tall buildings to solar flares can adversely affect your listening experience. And unless you have a whole lot of pull with the local zoning board—or you’ve figured out how to control the sun with the power of your mind—most of those problems are going to fall solidly on the “can’t do anything about that” side of the line.
However, if your reception problems persist, you’re probably dealing with an equipment malfunction, most of which are easily fixed.
Is Your Antenna Mast Extended?
There are a lot of ways that a manual antenna mast can end up pushed in, like if a car wash attendant forgot to pull it back out, or maybe a large bird decided to perch on it. Whatever the case, if you have a retractable mast and your reception has been awful lately it’s definitely worth checking this first.
Since antennas function by picking up radio waves, it only stands to reason that being shoved down inside the car might make it difficult for your antenna to function correctly. Pulling it back out, if you find it shoved in, may be all it takes to vastly improve your reception.
This may sound like extremely basic stuff, but it’s actually surprisingly common for manual antennas to be retracted and then left that way. Since there isn’t any mechanism to prevent these masts from being retracted, anyone can walk by and shove your antenna down. It’s especially common for car wash attendants to push these in to keep them from breaking off in the wash, and if someone doesn’t remember to pull it back out on the other side, it’s pretty easy to just drive away none the wiser.
Electric antennas that extend when the radio is turned on can also fail in the down position, in which case your radio reception will probably be pretty bad. And since a lot of these antennas are outside your normal field of vision, you may not even notice that the motor is broken unless you specifically go looking for it.
While you may be able to use pliers to pull out a failed electric antenna, doing so may strip the gears or damage the motor.
Check Your Antenna Connections
One of the most common causes of poor car radio reception is a poor antenna connection. If the antenna cable is poorly seated in your head unit, or any of the connections are loose, worn, or corroded, you’ll often find it difficult to tune into your favorite station.
The first thing to check is the connection between the antenna cable and the back of your head unit. If that’s properly seated, then you may want to find a station you can tune into and then gently wiggle the antenna itself back and forth. If the connection is solid, you shouldn’t notice anything. If the connection is loose, you’ll probably notice the tuner drop and then reacquire the signal. If that happens, you should tighten the antenna and check the grounds.
Get a New Antenna
When inspecting your antenna connections, you may find that your antenna mounting hardware or mast is corroded, rusted, or broken in some other way. In that case, replacing the antenna will usually do the trick. Since rust and corrosion can prevent the antenna from making a solid connection with your head unit, simply replacing the unit will often result in better reception.
There are also a handful of other cases that call for a new antenna. For instance, some cars come with “grid style” antennas mounted on the rear window glass instead of conventional whip or mast antennas. These flat antennas have some aesthetic benefits, and they can’t be broken off by a car wash or a vandal, but they often suffer from poor reception in big cities or hilly areas. In some cases, a whip antenna will provide better reception.
Install a Signal Booster
Radio signal boosters are far from a panacea for poor reception, but there are specific circumstances where they will cure what ails you. If you can receive a signal from a particular station, but it’s especially weak, then a signal booster might improve your reception. However, boosters won’t do anything for you if the signal degradation relates to obstructions like tall buildings and hills.
Get a new head unit
On the whole, the radio tuners in cars’ head units are far more advanced than home radios. There are plenty of edge cases and exceptions, but even a cheap digital head unit has a whole lot more going on under the hood than your average clock radio or boom box.
That being said, not all head unit radio tuners are created equal. So if you’ve checked everything else, and you can’t blame your reception problems on the rain (or the tall buildings, or the nearby hills), then it might be time to replace your head unit.
Some low-end budget head units skimp on the radio tuner quality, but even if your radio was fine when it was new, failures do happen. So if nothing else does the trick, you may just have a busted car radio on your hands.
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