FM Antenna?

[AllDigital]

Anyone know where the FM antenna is on the Model 3?

The FM radio just stopped working after 4 days of working fine on our M3. I know FM is a dying format, but my wife has 3-4 stations that she really likes that aren’t available on TuneIn.

We’ve done all the regular resets and retries to setup the stations again, but nothing works. I suspect the antenna connection maybe got bumped or removed.

She made a service appointment but the first available in Orange County was Jan 25th. Anyone know if this is in the back window (like the S) or front?

 

[Stoneymonster]

FM hasn’t worked for me since delivery, and I haven’t heard of it working for anyone else either. The UI isn’t finished.

 

[AllDigital]

It might be UI related, but it worked well the first two days for us. No issue setting favorite stations and listening to them. Now it is not working even after multiple UI resets.

 

[MrBilly]

Had my model 3 for almost 2 weeks. FM also suddenly stopped working, no sound, for maybe 15 minutes on like the 3rd day. Not sure what fixed it, just kept playing with the UI. Working great ever since. HD FM shows off the GREAT sound quality. Much better than my model S with upgraded sound in my judgement. AM radio and XM are not on the UI of the 3 (yet?). I think the FM antenna can be seen on the rear window higher up than the defroster.

 

[Stoneymonster]

Had my model 3 for almost 2 weeks. FM also suddenly stopped working, no sound, for maybe 15 minutes on like the 3rd day. Not sure what fixed it, just kept playing with the UI. Working great ever since. HD FM shows off the GREAT sound quality. Much better than my model S with upgraded sound in my judgement. AM radio and XM are not on the UI of the 3 (yet?). I think the FM antenna can be seen on the rear window higher up than the defroster.

Hmmm.

 

[gg_got_a_tesla]

I've had no issues at all with FM. Yes, great sound quality indeed with FM stations.

 

[Stoneymonster]

I've had no issues at all with FM. Yes, great sound quality indeed with FM stations.

Ok, clearly I gotta reboot or poke at the screen randomly.

 

[Stoneymonster]

Ok I think I figured it out. The Model 3 works a little differently than the Model S. It wants to scan the entire frequency band for stations in the background, but to do that it needs to have the radio up and sitting for a bit. Out of the box, ours was uninitialized, had no stations and said it was tuned to 0.1, which is a bogus frequency. After letting it sit for a few minutes, stations started populating at the bottom of the screen. Once it was done, our entire area's worth of stations was there, we could tune to them, favorite them, use the advance/rewind controls to change between them. Since we always changed away from the FM radio when it looked like it didn't work, it never got to do the initial scan.

So long story short, if your FM appears to be broken, turn it on, let it sit. They could have done a better job of communicating this on startup and certainly should have handled the "uninitialized" state better.

 

[favo]

What happens when you are on a road trip and change broadcast areas. Do the old stations disappear and new ones appear? Is there much lag? I assume your local favorites don't go away. Can you tell it to scan or jump to the next detected station manually? What order are detected stations shown in (frequency, call sign, signal strength, genre)? Could someone post a picture of the current interface?

 

[Stoneymonster]

What happens when you are on a road trip and change broadcast areas. Do the old stations disappear and new ones appear? Is there much lag? I assume your local favorites don't go away. Can you tell it to scan or jump to the next detected station manually? What order are detected stations shown in (frequency, call sign, signal strength, genre)? Could someone post a picture of the current interface?

I don’t know, and I could be wrong about some of this. I suspect it’s fast enough that as stations come and go you won’t notice any lag. I think they shown up in frequency order.

 

[AllDigital]

Yay. FM is now working, but the fix was not easy. The service center had the car for six days. Replaced the tuner and then replaced the entire central computer. Everything about the radio and the car is working great now. I got 50.13 upgrade, but I don’t see anything different over 50.12.

While I was there, I got to talk to a few of the techs. They said the computer in the Model 3 is the fastest and best in the Tesla line-up. Much faster (even water cooled) than the S or X tech. That makes for better auto-pilot, but it also means they had to write most of the firmware over again.

Interesting that Wifi is enabled at the service center, when in range, but not an option at home. One person there said he thought it might be due to security, but he wasn’t sure. They might still be testing the security in light of the recent (global) Wifi cyber bug.

 

[gg_got_a_tesla]

Thanks for the update, @AllDigital. My 3's computer may have to be replaced too as the LTE Radio appears to be broken; and yes, curiously, WiFi works at the service center:

Issue with network connectivity

 

[Msjulie]

FM is mandatory for some of the drive in's around here