[dman]

The tuner in mine is absolutely horrendous. I also have the non-RF 6 disc system. Everytime I go under a bridge, it drops to mono and then takes 30 seconds to fully recover...just in time for the next bridge. Funny thing is that I am probably only 30 miles from the radio station towers and yesterday when I was 70 miles away, out in the country these same stations came in MUCH better. In town sucks big time.

 

[dman]

I don't know if there are any antennas that have a built in booster or not. I generally don't like signal booster as they can add noise to your stereo signal. With the reception being so horrible though, a booster isn't out of the question for me. I really don't think that a bigger or longer antenna will do any good though. Actually antennas are a compromise altogether. Depending on what station you are listening to and the frequency being transmitted you want a different length antenna for each station. For instance a short antenna would pick up lower frequency stations better (i.e. 92.5 on your FM dial) while a longer antenna would help you pick up stations on the higher frequencies (i.e. 107.5). It might actually be the other way around, I don't remember for sure, but it is something like that. The ideal antenna would be an automatic one that would extend and retract to different lengths depending on what station you were tuning to. That's the theory as I understand it anyway.

 

[dman]

Here, this article may help understand that theory better:
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/radio7.htm

 

[dman]

Has anyone had their dash apart to make sure that the antenna is actually connected to the stereo. Seems to me that could very well be the problem.