Assuming you're talking portable hand held units here?
I have one of these that lives in our little emergency kit, it's nice and compact and has worked perfectly everywhere that I've needed it to for the last 5 or 6 years.
https://www.roadtechmarine.com.au/pll-world-band-radio/p/TDA033When I went in to buy this one I thought I would want the bigger $200 unit, but it is really big and we really only use AM/FM radio very rarely or when there is an emergency weather event happening.
So pumping sound quality is not that important for us in a hand held radio, that's what a smart phone, Spotify and bluetooth speaker are for...
What aerial do you have ?
I installed a radio in the van at xmas and it came with a short stubby aerial. Useless.....could get heaps better reception by holding the aerial ?
Make up a 3 or 4m long lead from any sort of small wire, put a lug on it and unscrew the aerial and sandwich the lead under it. Then throw the lead over the top of the van....if that solves the problem, do what I did and buy a longer aerial ( 1.5m ). Only downside is you may need to unscrew it when travelling, which is a 5 sec job for me !!
The previous AM/FM camping radio that we had before we bought the one linked above, was just a really cheap little unit, the FM reception was rubbish.
Until one trip I snapped the antenna right at the base trying to get it in just the right position to get half decent reception. I stripped it down while camping and found a bit of medium gauge tie-wire that I bodgied up to make a 'temporary' fix.
After connecting my dodgy antenna the bloody thing came alive!! All of a sudden it had crystal clear sound and picked up every station far better then the car stereo.
So from then on I used to wrap the wire around the main spreader bar under the tarp or even better twist it onto the single strand fencing wire that the Nation Parks guys use at a few sites around the country side and I could enjoy absolutely perfect reception.
