1998 Lexus SC 300 Owners Manual - Page 139

AIR CONDITIONING AND AUDIO NOTICE To prevent damage to the antenna, make sure it is retracted before running your vehicle through an automatic car wash. FM reception tips A vehicle is not an ideal place to listen to a radio. Because it moves, reception conditions are constantly changing. Buildings, terrain, signal distance and noise from other vehicles are all working against good reception. Some conditions of FM may appear to be problems when they are not. The following characteristics are completely normal for a given reception area, and they do not indicate any problem with the radio itself. D Fading and drifting: FM range is limited to about 40 km (25 miles), except for some high power stations. If a vehicle is moving away from the desired station's transmitter, the signal will tend to fade and/or drift. This phenomenon is more noticeable with FM than with AM, and is accompanied by distortion. Fading and drifting can be minimized to a certain degree by careful attention to fine tuning, or you should retune the radio to another stronger station. D Static and Fluttering: When the line-of-sight link between a transmitter and vehicle is blocked by large buildings or the like, the radio sound may be accompanied by static or fluttering because of the characteristic of FM. In a similar effect, a fluttering noise is sometimes heard when driving along a tree-lined road. This static and fluttering can be reduced by adjusting the tone control for greater bass response until the disturbance has passed. D Multipath: Because of the reflecting characteristics of FM, direct and reflected signals may reach the antenna at the same time (multipath) and cancel each other out. As a vehicle moves through these electronic dead spots, the listener may hear a momentary flutter or loss of reception. D Station swapping: When two FM stations are close to each other, and an electronic dead spot, such as static or multipath area, interrupts the original signal, sometimes the stronger second signal will be selected automatically until the original one returns. This swapping can also occur as you drive away from the selected station and approach another station with a stronger signal. 122