AM / FM radio antennas problems.

I have a ‘15 base double cab with factory entune sat radio. It was a good radio but I wanted CarPlay so I changed to Sony and now I can’t get radio stations for crap. My truck had the shark fin and a fender mount antenna. My questions are. Factory radio got excellent radio signal and HD. Does the shark fin do both fm and satellite together? Was the fender ant an aftermarket? Which of the square antenna plugs is fm the white or the gray. I have used both to no avail. I haven’t tore apart the dash looking for a real coax hopefully coming from that fender antenna

 

AM/FM Antenna is the one on the fender. Did you plug it in?

 

I did. I tried both gray and white plugs. One nothing. The other I get a whopping 3 stations. None of them very well.

 

I was a professional car stereo installer for 36 years. I got out of the industry shortly after the 2nd gen Tacoma came out, way before 2015, so I can't tell you which plug it is.

I can tell you that I've installed Sony HU's that were no good right out of the box. Of all of the major aftermarket stereo companies Sony was the worst. I'm not implying they were all total crap but I can tell you there were significantly more Sony's bad out of the box than any other major brand. That includes no reception.

You can make a (very) temporary antenna just for testing purposes. Get 3 feet of wire, about 16-18 gauge, strip about 1/2"-3/4" of insulation off of one end of the wire, fold the copper over the insulation, and put that wire into the HU's antenna lead's hole that's in the center. You should get reception on FM nearly equal to a "real" antenna. You won't be able to receive any AM stations.

Good luck OP.

 

While on the topic of antennas, can the OEM fender mounted antenna be trimmed without ruining the reception? Maybe it would degrade reception in only end if the spectrum? Mine is about 1" too tall to clear my garage opening and I'm afraid of the constant antenna flexing causing an issue with either the antenna or the mounting area at the base. When I drive in/out I can see the base mount wiggle a bit over the fender sheet metal so I know it's moving a little bit. I would probably trim about 1.5-2"

 

The biggest problem with this is that it will not work. The newer stereos are not using the traditional round antenna connector any longer.

This: and not This:

 

Damnit, I saw that on an Alpine recently.

 

They keep changing crap just to screw us over...

 

It feels really good to store obsolete information (lol).

 

Boy, I got plenty of that. I even remember working on equipment that had vacuum tubes and no transistors...