Second time I’ve had this issue in the past month. The radio completely fades out when it reaches the HD frequency (or whatever is the proper term).
Intermittent issue, as I drove the car a few weeks ago for a couple-hour round trip to the suburbs and back downtown. Radio was flawless.
Anyone else experience something similar?
Mine did the opposite, when the hd signal went away I could barely here the radio. After I parked the car for than 15 minutes it was fine again
Yes, my reception is terrible. It goes in/out all the time, always FM HD stations. AM radio reception is pretty bad too. I’ve tried turning HD off but the problem seems to persist. SA claims it’s the case in all of Detroit metro. Says there is nothing they can do, and that they “turn off HD” for test drives :-\ Really annoying since the mk6 GTI has no issues with radio reception. I don’t road trip much in this car, so can’t confirm if the problem exists in other areas.
If anyone local to me is having similar problems, it’s always with 97.1 and 91.7.
Interesting. I haven’t had the issue before about a month ago, so it’s weird for it to pop up all of the sudden. Btw - as shown in the video, it’s not just two or three radio stations, but rather all of them. I couldn’t get any of them to work last night once they were on the HD frequency.
Very annoying.
Wow that is a b8 thing. How annoying. Maybe the radio just didn’t like your choice of music. That one ad seemed to play fine. I do li, etc your what the fuck statement coming at the end. You should be able to look at the radio in vagcom. You might see something odd in there that can be adjusted in the adaption settings. Try checking it out. It might be worth it for laughs.
Oh and you have a light bulb out.
^^ cool. I may run a few searches to see how to view the radio via VAG-COM. Like I said, it has been intermittent, so not sure if it’s the radio or just the quality of the HD frequency in my area. Guess I could try shutting off the HD - was never that impressed with it.
The light bulb thing . . . that’s from my LED setup. My car doesn’t recognize the LED bulb I have over my license plate, so I get that error every time I drive my car at night.
I find it hard to believe that the root cause are the radio stations. Especially for you in a major market like Chi town. I’m not sure if our GTI has HD radio, but it sounds much better. I personally think the antennas suck or the MMI receiver is terrible. I thought it might be due to all the aftermarket electronic crap i have (dash cam, radar detector), but turned that all off and still having problems.
Looking forward to if you’re able to solve things with VCDS.
What’s HD radio
I really couldn’t tell you other than I know it’s not “HD” as in HDTV. More of a branding thing I believe. But I reckon you already know the answer to your question 
It’s not that I care about HD radio, it’s that when it switches, the “regular” radio sounds like shit. So you get crackle pop every 20 seconds or so, which lasts for maybe 5 seconds while it searches for the HD feed again.
My radio does similar thing, not just when it hits the HD radio since I think it’s on HD all the time (NYC area), and it does sound much better than regular non-HD stations but it would just all of a sudden cut out and usually withing a minute or two from cold start in the morning and sometimes even in the middle of driving. It just goes silent or slight humming noise and that’s it until I turn the car off, wait for a few minutes for the fans to stop and than turn it back on - the radio comes back on immediately. Annoyed by it and did a bit of searching but only got the MMI software/firmware upgrade suggestions (mine was flashed like a year ago from what I can say) and/or amplifier needing to be replaced (not sure about that one). Please help! I’ve got 2011 B8 S4.