My Radio all of a sudden quit receiving on AM, Well I can only hear someone for about 1/2 a mile. It has no back ground noise on the Am but on FM it is fine... When you turn the channel change knob it makes a loud clicking sound which to me seems to be a dead short in it somewhere.

In my experience the JVC brand hasn't maintained it's early promise of quality and I avoid the brand these days.

It would have been helpful if you described the noise and mentioned whether it was constant on both FM and AM. Excessive noise isn't unusual on AM due to the inability of the basic circuitry to reject the various sources of interference found in the average home, partly because the AM ferrite rod antenna is usually inside the radio. The average AM radio is highly receptive to receiving and amplifying lots of interference from many sources especially that radiated by fluorescent lighting, cfl bulbs and even nearby mains wiring resulting in a loud hum or buzz.
With the high popularity of FM and the introduction of DAB that has increasing popularity, the development of AM receivers ceased several decades ago.

FM is immune from that type of interference but is by no means able to reject all interference and a powerful signal from an external antenna produces the best result, the best signal to noise ratio.

Assuming the radio isn't faulty, the problem is most likely interference. If the power cord has a ground conductor it is very important it is connected to a good electrically quiet ground. If this isn't possible it could improve things to use an independent ground to the outer conductor of the coax cable to the FM antenna.

Hi Bob,

The simple answer is that you can't, really, but you can reduce it. Both AM and FM radios have background noise when not on a station.

You don't mention whether you are having a problem with an AM or FM receiver. So, I will give you info on both.

AM portable radio's can be turned to minimize noise pickup. This may help somewhat if the noise is far away and you can put it into a null.

Noise on FM is quite often caused by the receiver circuits being overloaded bu strong signals. Shortening the antenna often helps the overloading situation. I live within a mile of two different stations that overload my bedside radio. I shortened the wire antenna to just a stub, and now the problem has disappeared and I can pick up both equally well.

Most BROADBAND NOISE is man made. you may find that some of your newer electronic devices, LED bulbs, Cell chargers, etc are creating it. An easy way to determine if you are causing the problem is to just pull the main breaker in your residence. This will kill all electrical items in the house. If it goes away, then you have a good chance of finding the source.

If you have an external antenna, check you antenna connections.
Weather can change your reception. Are the stations you can hear local? within 30 miles? Or is there an amplifier on your antenna system? It may have quit functioning. if you have cable TV you might want to hook up your stereo to that system, you will need a 75 to 300ohm adapter that you can pick up from an electronics store or online.
(coax to twin lead)

WX will work because its on a higher band and its receive only. Now if you are listening to AM and there is a ton of ground noise or maybe none at all its due to ground plane. Either you are not getting a strong signal which will give you no noise or a real strong signal which will not let you talk much more than maybe a mile which again is ground plane , giving too much won't let you transmit and too little there is no one to transmit with .

Are you using the noise blanker? Are you also finding noise on regular AM radio in vehicle? How good is the connection on the coax?

How good is the antenna ground to chassis? How good is the antenna?

If you address the various sources of general RF hash that would also aflict the AM reception in your vehicle, that would be the first thing to address. It would probably be a good idea to use some contact cleaner or LPS1 and spray down the switches and controls. I know on one of my own that the dirty contacts are enough to kill off reception.

If these things do not improve it, and you do not mind going into the radio- in the reciever stages are a number of 1N60 diodes, and they have a nasty habit of becoming leaky and noisy. Replacing them should help quite a lot if nothing up to this point has.

hello please check the rear of the radio as antenna could have come away from it hearing sounds like cb radio do you mean transmissions can you hear someone talking ,its probably someone near you that you are picking up

switch from DTS to regular stereo aound and see if you can hear it then.

Turn the squelch until you hear noise, then back off. Also, make sure you have a "+" and not a "-" by your group number as it will lock out channels that don't have a matching PL tone (CT). Make sure your group is set to FM and not MOT, or AM.

The question is, do you hear any sound? Is just the display off or is the entire unit shutdown? Can you tell?

These displays are known to develope poor solder connections at the power input and ground pins. If you can solder, open up the unit (unplugged of course) and examine the pins for the display. This will be on the PC board attached to the front panel. The pins at either end of a long line of pins will be the power and ground pins. Reasolder those pins, taking care not to short the pins together and try the unit once done. If that does not resolve the problem (assuming it is just a display problem), update this with as many details as you can about the behavior of the unit and we'll look further.

Dan

RUSHING SOUND ?
1. Get the noise then disconnect the coax and see if noise goes away on receive, if noise goes away then address the ground on your antenna,
if noise still there then address the ground wire from power source