I just bought a used 2005 Outlander with only 16K in it.
I have had only one problem so far. (well, other than my wife backing into her brother's truck, causing a little dent in the bumper...I don't let her drive it anymore!!!)

I have an Infinity 6 CD changer which is great...and the FM reception is good and the sound is fine, but when I try to listen to AM for a baseball game or talk radio, I can hardly hear it at all. There is a lot of fuzz and I have to crank up the volume real high to hear it at all.

I live in KC and we have 3 AM stations that I can normally pick up hundreds of miles away, but now, I can't pick them up when I am IN town.

The antenna is on the top of our Outlander towards the back in the middle. I have seen a few other Outlanders, and their antenna's are on the front, on top of the fender, next to the hood.

Has anybody had any problems like this with radio reception? If so, what did you do about it to fix it?

I have a similar set-up as you, and I've never had good reception in on the AM band. But it's SO rare (read: never) that I would ever use it, so I haven't actually complained....

I have a fender mount antenna and tryed changing the mast to the smaller style like you guys have on the top of your cars, but a little longer and the reception sucked! I changed it back to the original big ugly mast antenna it came with. Perhaps your little stub antennas do not have an amplifier with them...it's something I'm not too familiar with, but when I was shopping for the smaller antenna an amplifier was reccomended for the antenna.