Well, it should receive the stations then. Maybe there's something wrong with the tuner chip, i know that on my old Actions player a solder point on the FM board broke and thus the player wouldn't go into radio mode anymore. I fixed the soldering and enjoyed the player for a few more months till the battery eventually went too low to be of any more use.

The FM reception can be improved by taking a piece of insulated wire (one from the ferrite antenna of an old AM radio should work), stripping the insulation on one end and soldering that end at the ground pin of the headphone jack, then cramming as much wire inside of the player as possible. I was able to get flawless FM reception on all stations in town when i did this little mod to my old player.

Sadly there is no other "operating system" you can use on the player besides the one that came with it from the factory.

thanks so much, i really appreciate the time you took to respond. my biggest disappointment is just to learn i can not change the operating system. i really wish there was a way. the ipod cannot even play a mpeg video. it just plays .AVI which are not comon