Problems with car radio

[Court Jester]

I wonder if anyone has any ideas as to the problem with my wife's radio please. She has an Alpine CD radio head unit which we fitted from my old s2000 about 3 years ago, so the radio is about 5 years old. It has always worked fine. When travelling up the A1 on Christmas Eve it started losing reception on every BBC station. It is RDS so should keep retuning itself. The fault has continued.

It is fitted to a Defender so has a manual old school metal telescopic aerial on the wing. That is fully up. Yesterday I took the head unit out and checked the aerial plug was still in. It was. Trying to manually tune it will pick up higher frequencies (eg Radio 1 and upwards on the band) but not lower frequency stuff (eg Radio2 or 4).

Any ideas as to the fault please? Could the aerial cable degrade and if so how do I check without removing it?

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

[DuraAce]

Try the radio in another car? Or use a substitute aerial to bypass the one in the car?

Could be a breakdown/corrosion in the aerial cabling.

[Superhoop]

RDS is nothing to do with auto tuning when radio reception becomes poor, it determines what information is displayed about the radio station you are listening to i.e. what song is playing and who the artist is.

Auto tuning is dealt with by AF (auto frequency)... Are you sure that hasn't been switched off?

[littleredrooster]

Superhoop said:

RDS is nothing to do with auto tuning when radio reception becomes poor, it determines what information is displayed about the radio station you are listening to i.e. what song is playing and who the artist is.

Not on FM, unless I'm very much mistaken; that only works on DAB - I think you may be confusing the two. RDS carries many other bits of information, including Programme Type but not artist/track details. It also carries AF signals, so the rest of your post is quite true, although it is the RDS which carries it.

Superhoop said:

Auto tuning is dealt with by AF (auto frequency)... Are you sure that hasn't been switched off?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System

[Court Jester]

Thanks for your comments. I will double check the AF isn't switched off, but as it isn't finding any stations lower down the frequency range I don't think that can be the issue. How likely is the aerial cable corroding, and do you know if there is a simple test (other than a second aerial) please?