Can anyone explain this strange electrical "issue" - radio and fog lights

Over the summer, I removed factory fog lights with the installation of an Apex front bumper, and installed an Amazon pair of fog lights in the Apex. I kept the factory wiring and switch.

Now I rarely listen to FM radio, so I am not sure when this "issue" began...prior to new fog install or not.

I happened to be listening to FM radio, and noticed that the radio station would randomly lose signal, completely. As in going from music playing clear as day, to complete static noise making the music completely inaudible. No slowly losing signal, no music in the background, and had nothing to do with my surroundings or hills. This bothered me so much that I began to listen to FM radio way too much. Maybe I'm old, but the music on most FM stations is hard to listen to. So I would continuously change stations, probably about an hour of drive time. And no matter what station I would change it to, the signal continued to completely drop, completely random. Sometimes it went out really fast and would come back right away, then sometimes it would go out for a while.

Until it just clicked - whenever I was driving with my brights on, the signal was good. As soon as I turned my brights off, the signal would go out. Depending on who was around me/coming at me, and where I was driving depended on if my brights were on or not. So I started playing with all sorts of things and trying to figure this out. Then I realized that with the factory wiring, my fog lights were going out when I would turn my brings on. When fog lights are off, and brights are turned on and off, radio has no effect. When brights are off, as soon as fog lights go on, the signal goes off. Bluetooth and CD had no effect by any lights being turned on.

There is zero other affect on anything else with the vehicle - I've played with all of the electronics that I can and have had no other issues or noticed anything else.

Anyone have any idea of why fog lights would have any affect on a radio signal? Not a big issue by any means, this will probably simply result in me listening to the radio even less. But I am confused as to why something like this would happen.

 

Are the new fogs LEDs? I know people have had issues with LED cab lights interfering with their key fob, so it may be something similar here.

 

Just a quick search of LEDs interfering with radio brought up a bunch of hits.

 

Yes, they are LEDs. Looks like you answered that question. I suppose I could have googled it, didn't even think of it. Not sure why I assumed it was solely a tacoma issue either.

But thank you

 

Yep LEDs can interfere with radio signals depending on how they are driven and what kind of filtering circuitry they have in them, the cheap chinesium ones tend to be the worst in that area.

 

Sure thing. Generally it's the lower cost ones that cause the most problems like these. Some people run them and have no issues at all, and then the unlucky ones have nothing but fits if they don't pony up for fancy/better made LEDs.

 

If you capture high frequency data you can build yourself a band stop or out of band rejection filter with a simple RC network. For all the trouble it’s worth to do that it’s probably easier to just buy a quality LED kid that doesn’t produce unwanted noise on the power circuit.