Radio reception....reduction

[Stickyfinger]

Strange one (for me)

In the Activa I have a fitted Sony head unit with a AutoLeads adaptor and wheel control lead, works great.
I have a multi plug with the feed taken from the ciggi lighter power supply....works great

IF I plug in any of the phone chargers etc, reception quality drops.

I hate wires and have a mental block on sparkie stuff

[Peter.N.]

Although I was an electronics engineer for 50 years I understand very little about this modern stuff The only thing I can suggest is that the inverter circuit in the charger is radiating a signal which is suppressing the AGC on the radio making it less sensitive. Does it affect the CD as well?

Peter

[Mandrake]

All of the cigarette lighter socket USB phone chargers I have tried (I've tried 3-4) generate a lot of switching hash and pass it back into the power supply due to poor filtering. Some are worse than others though, and unfortunately the cheaper (£3-4) ones are much worse.

I would give a better quality (£10-£20) USB charger a try to see if it helps.

Beware - if your Xantia is a Series 1 and doesn't have the cigarette lighter socket on the side of the centre console, the majority of chargers available won't fit in the socket in the ashtray! And even some that do, will not make contact on the centre pin due to the socket being a bit non standard in shape preventing the plug going in far enough. (Nice job Citroen...)

When I found one that fitted in the available space I still had to modify it by extending the length of the centre pin...

[Stickyfinger]

There is a multi plug attached to the foot-well side panel with two chargers (phone/satnav + spare socket), the power supply lead for that then plugs into the ciggie socket on a lead.
I will try with the chargers removed from the multi plug land just the multi plug lead inserted later.

[Stickyfinger]

Turns out that it is the USB outlet charger (for the phone) that is the problem....FU Samsung !