FM tuner noise

Here is the last episode of my long and winding saga with groud loop whine:

The player works fine but when I put the tuner on I get ignition whine that is so noticable that it is not worth listening to. Here is what I have done to troubleshoot it:

1. taken the entire HU out and disconnected the antenna while listening to the tuner. The noise is still there so no noise is entering via the power antenna.

2. Disconnected the power from the tuner. noise totally disappears.

3. Cut the ground wife from the tuner to the harness and instead ran a jumper ground from the ground lead out of the tuner to the single ground contact point in the trunk where the ground for the HU and the Amp goes to.

4. No change....whine still exists

So I am thinking it must be a problem with the internal grounding of the tuner.

Any and all suggestions/comments/feedback will be welcome!

Thanks,

Ed

During any of this, did you ever try to contact support? If it's a fault in the tuner module (and you seem to have done some pretty good diagnostic steps to narrow that down), they would be able to help you diagnose it.

I am also assuming you tried removing the tuner extension cable or that you didn't use the extension cable in the first place, as per this FAQ entry. (I think we discussed that one before.)

Thanks for the feedback. Actually I had contacted support prior to this discovery and David was very helpful and walked me through the process of returning the HU for diagnosis. But before I did that I did some tests , with the result being what I posted. And yes, I did remove the jumper cable, so it is not due to that.

Perhaps I will contact David again for his wisdom!

Thanks,

Ed

You need to check (if you are using a factory installed antenna) that the antenna is a powered one. A significant number of OEM antennas these days require and active signal booster, which needs a feed voltage. This is mainly for styling reasons, ie. they are kept short, which means they have poor s/n and have to be wound to get the wavelength sensitivity right. Hence, signal amp on the base of the antenna.

The empeg doesn't have an antenna feed, so you will need to provide this yourself. Tony wrote an excellent FAQ answer on this somewhere. It seems to be the most frequent cause of bad FM reception.