Bought myself a cheap sharkfin type fake Ariel cover as my standard Ariel looked naff and the rubber was rotted. Stripped my old Ariel base and connected a repair wire with a long coil into the antenna section of the fake base. Reception seems unaffected but was never that good anyway. Still gets a solid lock on major stations. Total cost £1.44 from Ali express

So your radio aerial is now a coil of wire under the headlining, and this is simply a dummy?

I thought the proper aerial base is powered to amplify the signal?

I suspect the reason for poor reception originally was that the first OEM base had failed due to water ingress, the second new one does not have an amplified base which when used with the OEM radio will be recording fault codes to say as such.

I've got a used but fully functional 'whip' aerial with FAKRA connector from my Yeti sat in my garage doing nothing if you want it for not a lot of money.

No my original aerial base is now inside the dummy one, Inside the oem base is a small copper contact which touches the underside of the original antenna, I cleaned the corrosion off it and soldered a repair wire onto it which is now coiled inside the  dummy antenna section. The dummy antenna has a removable base, i drilled it to the shape of the bolt from the original base and passed it through, the dummy base was then screwed back together with the original ariel bolt protruding and the whole thing was bolted back onto the car. The dummy has a 3m double sided pad which covered the whole area and a rubber seal that surrounds it. The 3m pad creates a nice watertight gasket and the rubber outer seal is a secondary barrier.

excuse the lousy trackpad drawing

Oh I see.

 

That definitely is cheapskate antics