I have noticed that the radio reception is not as good as it was prior to switching head units. I have the following equipment: Alpine 9886, Modifry wired-dci, plug-n-play adapter, svc control feature, and the legacy power antenna. I installed myself. Was it foolish of me to assume that the power antenna wire would be prewired using the Modifry pnp dci unit? That would be an easy 10 minute fix if that were the problem. Has anyone else experienced any receptoin problems with the after market antennas? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Eric

 

I think it's reasonable to assume the power antenna wire is wired into
Modifry's PnP harness - all he does is s2000, and he knows the drill.
Most aftermarket headunits will have worse sensitivity because they've
been biased towards better sound quality at the expense of reception,
while OEM headunits usually go the other way (some headunits have a
local/DX switch allowing you to vary the tradeoff yourself).
Over the years I've seen a variety of complaints about Alpine reception
specifically, though I don't know if it's because Alpine is any different,
or just because there are more Alpine users here than anything else.
IIRC, there's one band, AM I think (50/50 chance) which is virtually
unusable without the power antenna, so that's a good test if it's getting
power.

 

i have noticed worse radio reception now that I have installed an alpine headunit with the modifry DCI, previously I had an older panasonic HU with no DCI

 

The reason I asked is when I had an 9803 in my Toyota Avalon it picked up FM stations more strongly than it did with the factory. I may end up switching back to a factory type antenna over the aftermaket. I don't listen to the radio a lot but i do get tired of shuffling through 4,000 songs