E46 330i - Dreadful Radio Reception

[Truckosaurus]

Now then.

I have recently acquired a 2002 e46 330i Touring. It comes with a "BMW Business" radio and cassette player head unit with a CD changer in the boot.

This is the worst radio I have experienced in a motorcar in the nearly 2-decades since I used to borrow my mum's 1984 Metro that only had an AM radio.

The BMW unit is unable to follow the FM signal of a single station and you are therefore retuning frequencies manually (often without success) every few miles.

I have studied the manual and don't seem to have it in some bizarre mode and the "RDS" light sits there glowing at me, it also doesn't seem to cut in with any traffic news either.

My questions are thus:

1) is this normal behaviour for this unit?

2) are other BMW headunits any better at radio reception?

3) are there any after market head units that look suitably OEM in the dashboard?

Thanking You.

[Vroomer]

I had this issue.

I think the problem is with the aerial, which is in the rear side window.

The connection becomes corroded over time, resulting in the problems you describe. Unfortunately it may mean a complete new window.

The head unit is probably OK.

[Remagel2507]

I had this problem on quite a few cars as well as an antenna on the window there are few like module/antenna things, I think we either replaced on tried to fix these modules and 99% it solved the problem. The module I can remember replacing is behind a piece of interior trim of the LH side rear 3/4 panel.

Hopefully this link will show you where all the compenents are and the part numbers for them.
http://www.realoem.com/bmw/partgrp.do?model=EN52&a...

Hope this helps

[Truckosaurus]

Well, after some more fiddling with the buttons on the headunit, I've got it into 'RDS*' mode which seems to have done the trick. I even got a traffic report on the way to work today.