R20 radio - very poor signal

[BrianTheSnail]

I assume the radio aerial is up in the plastic somewhere. Liz has just got back from a shopping trip and complained how poor the radio is, no reception on our local BBC radio station and even the normally very strong Radio 4 etc are poor reception.

Is this standard on the new R20s or are we likely to have a problem somewhere? I have to take the van back to Freeborn next week (driver's door window doesn't always work and needs ignition off/on again to get it to work) so will add this to the niggle list.

Pity there are a couple of niggles as the van has just been away for 3.5 weeks and been brilliant in every other respect - even getting marginally over 10 miles to the litre (45.5+ mpg) on a German autobahn run when I was probably doing around 70 for most of the journey.

[peterholden]

We have an 07 plate Outlook and our aerial is mounted up on the roof at the back, the signal on the radio is very good, much better than our Berlingo car but someone seems to be messing about with analogue signals because we keep getting very short (much less than 1 second) breaks in transmission.

Peter

[BrianTheSnail]

Just taken another look at my R20 and there is no visible aerial at all. On the old C15 the aerial was at the front above the windscreen and bent up to follow the line of the luton. The R20 has a ridge line in the middle of the luton and up onto the roof that I assume is part of the mould but would be an obvious place to conceal a thing aerial.

Wherever it is I just confirmed Liz's observation. Classic FM is an absolute stonking signal on all my other radios here, stronger than any of the Beeb stations (which are all perfectly acceptable on my house radios) yet the audio still breaks up slightly in the van.

[Mr T]

R25 radio

Our radio on the R25 is very good ,But i do not know where the aerial is hidden


brian

[BrianTheSnail]

I've just spoken with Freeborn and they know the R20 has poor radio reception. The aerial is in the body, up in the luton, as I suspected. Sometimes they can get adequate reception by making sure all contacts between the radio and the aerial are extremely good. However, it seems that they are increasingly adding separate external antennas either on the windscreen or body.

I shall report on the fix in a week's time after it and the occasionally malfunctioning driver's window have been fixed.

[BrianTheSnail]

Well the van is back complete with a new internal windscreen electronic aerial. Radio reception has improved from bad to OK. It still isn't as good as trannies here in the house but certainly listenable to, albeit with the odd scratch or crackle.

As for the window - apparently I just needed to reset it's processor (yes the windows have their own computer chip!). Manually lowering the window fully down and holding for a second until a tiny click is heard and then bringing it back fully closed and another click and it certainly seems to be in auto-mode every time now, so hopefully that's all that was needed.

Still I got to drive one of the new Citroën DS4s as a courtesy car which was a bit nippier than the van.

Wonder who owns the metallic silver R20 that was parked outside? It does look quite nice and one of the few colours that might be better than the bog-standard white.

[Moya]

Wonder who owns the metallic silver R20 that was parked outside? It does look quite nice and one of the few colours that might be better than the bog-standard white.

That's our R20, got it new last year and decided it would be nice to have something other than the white. It is over there at the moment having a couple of things done under warranty, one of which is the aerial. We have had the same problem with the reception.

[BrianTheSnail]

Nice van - I like the silver colour. Neville persuaded me that standard white was the best option but had I have seen yours beforehand I could well have been tempted.

Probably doesn't look quite as grubby as the white does after almost no time.

Hope nothing too serious needed doing - apart from the radio and the weird window problem ours seems pretty good.

[Artoo0]

We saw a silver R20 in a showroom somewhere in Cornwall (St. Austell?)a couple of years back.
I was quietly hoping we might spot one when we started looking!

Actually it must have been 4 years back, the Rugby World Cup was on - strewth doesn't time fly? So would that make it a Duo?

Geoff