5 Easy Tips To Improve Your Car Radio Reception

Have you ever been hitting the road and listening to an awesome radio station, when suddenly the signal is lost, and you have nothing to listen to but static? Well, having car radio signal problems might be annoying, especially if you have to travel a lot. That’s why we brought you 4 tips on how to improve car radio reception.

Verify your car antenna

A car antenna is just like any wire that conducts electric signals, the only difference, is that these signals are transmitted by air, and therefore, they are not as much consistent as transmitted-by-cable signals.
Even so, if you are asking yourself why my car radio wont pick up stations, there are a couple of things you can do to improve car radio reception and solve this problem :

• Extend your antenna mast. It may sound simple, but, the higher the antenna is, the more signals it receives.
• Wrap some foil around the tip of the car antenna. Aluminum is a good conductor, so signals will be captured better.
• Be sure to have the best car radio antenna, sometimes you will need to upgrade the old antenna model you already have.

Install a car antenna booster

If the reception problems are not related to a failure of the antenna or the car radio, it is quite likely that it is due to a poor radio signal. Your radio may be able to pick up the signal from a particular station, however, the signal may be very weak!
A car radio antenna amplifier will then solve the reception fault by boosting the received signal. This is how to make your car radio signal stronger.
In particular, the car radio antenna amplifier will be able to effectively increase the gain of weak radio signals and fix bad radio reception in car.

A car antenna amplifier will boost FM signal in car, it will work also for poor am reception.
The main disadvantage is that it amplifies all signals received at the antenna, including interference noise!!

Get a new car antenna

This is not a way to get better radio reception but one to make sure your antenna is working correctly. As a car antenna is always exposed to outdoor conditions, several factors can affect its performance (sometimes even with no chance of fixing it) like the weather, animals, sudden movements of the car, etc.
If unfortunately, any of those factors damage your antenna, you should make a test to confirm if there is nothing to do, and then get a new one, previously comparing features and requirements of the new antenna, to be sure it will work correctly on your car.

Switch your car stereo to “mono” mode

This method depends on the radio station you are trying to listen to and the type of head unit you have.
First, you need to see if you can change manually your car stereo to “mono” mode, if you can’t, it may be because you have a modern model which does it automatically.
But, if you can make the change manually, what you should do is switch to mono when you are trying to listen to a weak radio station. This is because stereo mode can increase noise when it comes to listening to weak stations.

Check the location of the station and its range

Sometimes, no matter how much you improve your vehicle to have better reception, the problem will be the range of the radio station you are trying to listen to.
This can be because of the radio station’s transmission equipment or the available room in the Radioelectric spectrum (the physical space where radio signals are transmitted).
So, if you have a favorite radio station, it might be a good idea to check out its details on its webpage before leaving.

So, if you are still asking yourself “how to make my car radio signal stronger?“, let me tell you that, even if you have the best car radio antenna, there are some external factors that you need to be aware of, too in case that you are not getting a good signal.