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Whenever I'm in the car, I can only pull in 2 strong AM stations (1 talk radio & the other a sports channel) & 1/2-dozen FM stations (mostly Spanish speaking channels). There's nothing I want to listen to, but geesh, I thought I would be getting dozens of stations to choose from in any large city in America??? I'm in Encinitas, 30-mi north of San Diego... certainly not a black hole, but being so close to a large city, I'm stunned that I get only static or very poor reception on the majority of stations the Scan/Search feature will stop on. BTW, when I was driving through downtown SD recently, the results were the same.
When in Denver, I didn't have this problem & had tons of stations to choose from. So, why is this happening & is there anything I can do to pull in more stations? I only have a small screw-on antennae on the roof... perhaps I need to buy something better???
I recently rented a Hyundai Elantra and I thought the radio in it was on the crappy side. My '99 GM had a Delco radio that was always great for reception and for a stock( it was an upgrade CD player) radio the sound quality was very good, too.
The GM had an actual antenna and I think the Hyundai had a built in one. If you have lots of low power AM stations they can drown each other out.
I remember one time our local SE PA radio station lost its main antenna in a storm and was using a much lower power one. On the same frequency was a Christian station out of North Carolina which greatly interfered with reception.
Is the antenna plugged in to the back of the radio? Is the connection good?
Thanks for the replies, everyone. No idea, Me. I can unscrew it from the roof & was told to do so if going through a car wash... which I've never done (it's only been hand washed). Sorry... I'm not mechanically inclined & don't know how it connects to the interior of the car.
Hoffdano... "What kind of car? Factory radio?"
2011 Honda CR-V (the most basic one, not a fully loaded SUV). Factory radio with CD player & an input for MP3 player.
I'm guessing it's not a broken part, since I had great reception with many radio station choices in Denver (AM & FM), until I relocated here. There weren't any bags squashed into the dash area, whilst relocating, so I'm guessing the wires underneath are all intact???
There have to be a ton of stations in San Diego, no? Is there something I can check underneath the dash? (Forgive my naive q's.)
No idea why you were getting reception in Denver, but not in San Diego. I recently went on vacation in SD and rented a Nissan Maxima. I can confirm the suburbs north of SD have plenty of FM stations.
There are 32 FM stations and 14 AM stations in the San Diego market.
AM.. Let's leave out of the conversation until the end, because.. To be honest.. AM is a beast unto itself. There's MANY things that blow out an AM signal and then there's the power of the station itself.
If you're only getting 6 FM stations out of 32 in the market.. Something is wrong. Do you have a clock radio? What reception are you getting on it? It should, in theory, be worse than you car.
Are you only getting the 6 stations when using scan? If you go through the dial, how many of the stations listed on that Wikipedia page do you get? What's the quality of them?
102.1 you should be getting period. It's licensed to Encinitas, though the transmitter is actually on Mount Soledad. The city of license should always be getting the signal. Though, I can tell you that 106.7 WJFK in DC went to a backup transmitter in the mid 00's and couldn't be picked up well in its city of license of Manassas.. But that was temporary.
AM signals.. Atmospherics play a part in them.. Here in SC, in winter, when the sun goes down, I can get the mighty KCJJ out of Cedar Rapids, IA. I've picked up WLS Chicago here before. Those are flamethrower stations.. WLS is a 50k watt station day and night.. KCJJ is 10kW during the day, but goes down to 1k watts at night, but, the higher in the AM band, the farther the signal can 'bounce'. During the day, even though it's transmitting with 10x the power, that signal probably only goes about 60 miles. There's a few of those AM stations in the SD market that are 500 watts. Those probably only carry to the building that the transmitter is located on.
And.. If the ignition system has any problems in your car.. The best detection for that is AM radio.
Something has to be wrong, likely a bad connection to your antenna.
Normally a radio should pick up far off stations broadcasting at 50,000 Watts during night time hours.
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