Quote Originally Posted by first_timer View Post
It's OK Mark, I'm still with you!

The only thing to add is that the behaviour of my MMI is NOT predictable and consistent. For example, we drove from home in Leicestershire to Tyneside a couple of weeks ago, and the radio was OK for at least half of the journey - it was picking up new stations, such as BBC Humberside as we passed through their area, but had packed up before we reached Durham and Radio 2 reception gave out on us just before we reached the Tyne Tunnel. On the return leg, it seemed fine. Something seems to randomly trigger the radio to become confused and forget what it is supposed to do. I haven't figured out what the 'something' is.
Yep - I fully agree - occasionally I do long journeys where I don't have the problem at all. Otherwise, things always work fine at the start of a journey, but then start to go wrong after a time - occasionally it's a ten minute window, sometimes it can be fine for two hours or more before the problem kicks in. This week it's been at around an hour or so into the journeys when things went awry. I can't see any rhyme or reason to it though.

A couple of months ago when the car went in to the dealer, the Master Tech told me that when he plugged his machine into the car, there were some errors flagged indicating it didn't recognise the radio, so he cleared the errors and re-installed the software update. My addled brain is now wondering if this could be anything to do with the issue? Is it possible that something is causing the car to flag errors with the radio after an indeterminate time, and this is causing the loss in tuning/TMC/TP functionality when this happens? I guess I'd need to have a VCDS computer plugged in during a journey to see if this was the case, or get the car to the dealer while the problem was happening and ask them to plug in and check. I also guess it would mean the car is automatically clearing the errors after each restart given that things work fine at the start of each journey. I'm obviously no expert, and I'm probably barking madly up the wrong tree, but at this point I guess any theory is worth airing, however bonkers

I was due to take the car back in on Monday and run around in their A6, but I now have to go to sunny Berkshire on Sunday night and I will not be back till Friday, so I will have to put the car swap back by a week.

I'm just off now to photograph my radio, TMC and TP settings so I can post them on here...

MF.