To start with...yes I understand that it's pretty sad that I enjoy AM radio the most. I drive a 2007 Prius with 150K+ on it and have been the only owner. AM radio reception has always been mediocre at best. Local stations that I pick up with ease in other vehicles at 40+ miles from the tower I typically start losing reception after 10-15 miles from the tower in my Prius. FM reception has always been fine (comparable to other vehicles I drive). I have the standard whip antenna (not shark fin). Does anyone have ideas on potential (cheap) fixes to improve the AM radio range? Ground plane alterations? Alternate antennas? Cable changes? Other? I'm open to ideas if anyone has attempted something and found it to help. Thanks in advance.
You might try unscrewing and removing the whip antenna and checking for rust. When you replace it you could put a little dielectric grease (spark plug boot grease) on the threads. If you were losing reception because of high resistance caused by corrosion, this would probably affect the quality of your FM reception also. So this might not do anything. Best to start out cheap though.
By all means, check for good antenna connections (and grounds) at both ends of the cable. Your first experiment maybe should be to see what happens to the reception with the whip OFF the car, disconnected. If you are dealing with the right antenna, AM should almost disappear and FM should get much worse too. If everything checks out good with the antenna, you might just have a crappy radio.
At least for FM, the standard antenna is better than the sharkfin I have. We do have some radio experts who might know if there is a way to enhance AM reception. But the best way may be to see if the stations you like have streaming to your smart phone, and optionally simply tie that into your car audio by the audio-in port in the storage space between the front seats.\ Radio-locator.com gives you station reception maps and whether ot not they stream to internet. Also check web page of your station for streaming info. Then of course there's HD Radio etc
What's a smart phone? j/k. Thanks for the comments from all. I did try streaming for a short while, but we don't have unlimited data on our phone plan so I was burning through too much of our monthly allotment...didn't go over but got close and don't want to risk that one. (I'm cheap...I admit it) I had read the same thing in other posts about the sharkfin, so I won't both trying that one. I'll take a look at the antenna and try some dialectric grease since I happen to have some anyway. As the performance overall doesn't seem much worse now (at 150K) than what I had when the car was new (7 years ago), I'm guessing it sadly may just be the radio. Was just hoping that others had found simple things that seemed to work to get a bit more range out of the system. While I'm holding out hope to get another 100K out of this car before moving on to the next, I'm not really up for sinking too much money into the car since it is at that age where who knows how much more time it's got. Does anyone know the best way to get at the back of the radio to check grounds & connections back there? Thanks again for the comments all.
I don’t think problem with connections at the back of stereo unit are likely. But at the back of antenna they could be. Even if prius has those connections away from antenna. But if it’s just problem with stereo unit then better antenna and/or amplifier will probably fix it. It seems that Prius already has built in antenna amplifier in antenna.
