I have an L & K Octavia Mk 1 04 plate with standard radio setup, over the last few weeks reception has been getting worse and worse

Now it will not lock onto any signal for any length of time

I am not by any means an audio engineer.. so any advice of what to do would be really useful or do I just bite the bullet and take it to my local audio specialist to get it sorted

Chris

My guess is it is the antenna base that has had it... it has an in-built signal booster but suffers from water ingress that corrodes the circuit boards and degrades the signal. An aftermarket booster behind the headunit won't help as there won;t be enough signal reaching the headunit to boost so I'd just replace the antenna base with a new OE one. It should be easy to do (it was on our Fabia - ease the headlining down and undo a single nut on the base of the aerial, unplug the aerial base from the rest of the wiring (there is a connector nearby) and then fit the new one.

How hard is it to drop the rear headlining ?? (Estate)

Easy on the estate. Remove the side trims, and then the top trim. You can just slip your hand in along with an adjustable spanner to undo the bolt. I have replaced mine twice (sourced my replacement units from a scrap yard)