am/fm

[thejimrose]

IME installing car audio for a few years the typical reception of the
aftermarket radios was dismal. we also sold high end home audio [krell,
wilson, conrad johnson, theil, threshold, b+w, etc etc etc] so we had a few
hardcore fm guys in the store. every now and then we'd see an oem radio that
had great fm on the whole they are decent. however as fm is not sought after
by people buying aftermarket car radios, it's an afterthought at best.

i can't recall a single unit - alpine, clarion, kenwood, eclipse, etc that
had a model with a decent tuner in it. i have a 700$ top line kenwood with
no onboard amp and an external power supply [in a car radio!] and it's tuner
SUCKS. if you could pull local stations w/out noise you were doing alright
with the aftermarket. some of our customers actually had us put the oem
radios back in over this, and deal with line conversions to get the rest of
the system [amps, etc] working.

double check your connections - and you might have some ground noise seeping
in. the car radio typically gets grounded in 3 places; antenna [where the
antenna body mounts to the fender usually], wiring harness ground and the
metal/metal chassis connection bolting it to the dash. lifting one or more
of these can help. plastic nuts/bolts, duct tape, 3m strip caulk, rubber
washers are your friends. =) IIRC my preference was to run the wired chassis
ground from the head  to a clean piece of metal in the dash [make sure the
dash support metal you wire to is not isolated from the chassis] with as
short a wire as possible and have this be the only ground.

you can pull the radio and antenna and try different combo's with them
'loose' in the car to see if you get an improvement.

GL!
jim

>>I have installed an Alpine 9855, and I have exactly the same problem.
I made no change between the old (Sony) and the new radio connections,
but the reception is absolutely useless. I have not looked into the
problem yet, but I sure hope that the radio is not THAT bad.