I Remember (the late) Bernard Meltzer on WOR radio.
You could try an am fm signal booster. Google car am signal booster and you will see some options.
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There is an antenna amplifier located above the headliner but the first step is to inspect the antenna grid on the quarter glass.
You might try going to a dealer (Toyota or, say, Carmax), find a Highlander with your radio, see if itās just as bad.
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In the old days, we could adjust the trimmers on the tuning capacitor. We could also do an alignment with a signal generator and oscilloscope. This isnāt possible on todayās radio. Also, there were āclear channelā AM stations that broadcast day and night at 50,000 watts.
You might try your AM reception at night. If itās significantly better, then you will have to do only night driving.
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Sadly few makers put thAT in cars . HD FM is great and is CD quality sound and sadly they donāt install that either which is sad because HD FM will increase your station count by at least a third . Most FM stations run 2 or 3 HD channels . Have a HD fm tuner hooked to my home stereo , it sounds great .
I remember on my 59 Pont Wonder Bar, going to somewhere around 1500 AM and tuning for the best reception. We didnāt have FM then, nor cassettes, nor even VCRs I donāt think. We had cameras but you took the film to the drug store and came back four days later for the pictures. Then some enterprising guy came up with 24 hour developing and got rich. Oh oh, got off topic again.
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Mine too. Considerably worse than 10-20 years ago. Itās not the quality of the radios b/c theyāre the same. The cause of AMās poor reception these days must either be the broadcasters are sending out poorer quality signals, or thereās extra rfi in homes now, created by compact florescent and LED light bulbs most likely.
AM radio relies on a ground reflection for about half the received signal. If the antenna is not plugged completely into the back of the head unit and the ground contact is not good, you will get very poor reception.
There could be an issue with the ground connection at the base of the antenna also. If you have an embedded window antenna, tracing that connection could be very difficult.
The embedded antennas are really designed for AM reception anyway, but they will do it. AM radio waves are vertically polarized, FM are horizontally polarized. The old whip antennas were vertically polarized but did work for FM but the horizontally polarized FM antenna do not work so well for AM. That is why most home and portable radios have a separate antenna for AM. BTW, TV is also horizontally polarized.
Most embedded window antennas have a vertical section to them for AM but as I pointed out earlier, if the ground is not good, they donāt work very well, if at all.
With the shift away from AM, I wonder if overall transmission power is lower now for most stationsā¦
Power hasnāt been reduced generally. There are many more sources of RFI noise than there used to be, and they affect AM (amplitude modulated) much more than FM (frequency modulated) signals, like FM and TV stations. I donāt know much about satellite radio. And the āimprovedā AM HD signals create a waterfall noise on adjacent frequencies, adding to the din and decreasing the number of frequencies that can be heard clearly. So while power hasnāt been reduced, the greater noise levels make it seem that way in many cases.
Was the AM reception ever āgood or normalā in your estimation? Was there any sort of event that preceded the radio not being able to tune in AM?
Of the AM stations that you do receive, how is the quality? Do you hear a funny whirring sort of sizzle/zappy sound that rises and falls with the engines rpm?
Just trying to determine if this radio ever operated normally and if so,start hunting for a grounding issue and or the quality of the interface of the antennae plug in the back of the radio.
Or youāre simply remembering what AM sounded like when there was nothing to compare it to.
On the one hand, thereās basically no way to process an AM signal to filter out noise. Itās just the average signal level within the bandwidth of the the channel. You get the broadcast signal plus any noise within the bandwidth of the signal just dumped into the same bucket. FM isnāt affected because it tracks the biggest frequency componentāunless the noise is higher that the signal, it pretty much gets ignored.
On the other hand, thereās tons of cheap no-name electronics bring imported directly from China without any sort of FCC class B or C certification. A lot of that stuff has very poorly designed power supplies that emit noise all over the place, as well as having lousy power factor that causes inefficiencies and transmission. LED bulbs, the little switching power supplies that replaced transformers, etc.
I believe that the FCC has been reclaiming frequency rights from the old school clear frequency broadcasters. WLW and WJR used to have clear frequencies. Iām pretty certain the FCC cut back on the market power (==territory) that those starting used to have.
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To clear up a couple of misconceptions. AM has a very narrow bandwidth compared to FM or TV. TV picture is not FM, it used to be AM back in the analog days, now it is a combination of digitally switched AM and PM (phase modulation). The sound is FM (or was and I think still is but I could be out of date on that) and both signals ride on a common carrier that is horizontally polarized.
AM radio is vertically polarized, most electrical noise is also vertically polarized. However there is more new noise generated that is horizontally polarized because of new electronics. BTW, most weather RADARās are vertically polarized so they donāt interfere with FM and TV.
I seriously doubt that the FCC will do away with AM. AM centers around one megahertz (540kHz to 1.6MHz) and because of the low frequency and the vertical polarization that uses ground reflection, the signal follows the nap of the earth for great distances. It will always have a use for emergency communications. Clear channel stations got that designations because they are the primary communications for the general public during a national emergency. A few clear channel AM stations can provide emergency broadcasts to almost every part of the lower 48 states.