what are some decent starter am/fm tuners ?

There are some excellent sounding & reception (vintage) solid state tuners made by HH Scott 112, Pioneer 6200, Marantz, Fisher - which can be had very inexpensively. Of course you may prefer tubes but seems to me the SS versions have a somewhat better extension. But try some vintage RCV - MCintosh, Marantz, Scott,Fisher...

Onkyo T-9, Tandberg, Luxman T 450, Yamaha 7000.

Peregrine:

You don't indicate where you live, but unless you are in a large metro area with at least several top-notch FM stations, don't spend a bunch of money on a tuner. The overall programming and broadcast quality for FM has declined steadily for years, and there aren't more than a dozen metro areas in the country with FM stations that are good enough to merit a high-quality tuner. Infact, you might be best advised to consider getting one of the new digital radio satellite services, which cost around $12 a month. They have a much wider range of music choices, and the reception quality and content is superior to the FM stations in 95% of the country.

If you are going to buy a used FM tuner, you should consider some of the better analog tuners that were made in the late 1980's. Some of the Sansui and Pioneer analog tuners were quite good, as were the lower-cost Tandbergs. Most of the digitally-synthesized tuners within your budget built between 1990 and today have pretty similar performance specs. The NAD tuners are respectable, as are Adcom, Proton, and NEC (the NEC T-6E and T-6F were really excellent tuners for the money, but they are hard to find on the used market).

there is an incredible buy on a Nikko Gamma 1 FM tuner here on the AudiogoN...$50, A steal!

Scott,
Which digital radio services have you tried, and how is the fidelity compared to good fm? My only experience with this was years ago, when I signed up for a cable tv service because they had several dozen digital music-only channels sorted by format. It came with its own converter box but I was also able to run it through an outboard processor. Problem was, the fidelity was so poor regardless of processor that I just gave up on it. It was literally unlistenable, vastly worse than even mediocre fm. I was wondering if things have improved since then, or whether I was just unlucky with my particular provider.

If you have any experience with the new satellite-based services, that would be especially interesting as we do not have cable out this far. I'm just curious whether any of these services even deliver a signal comparable to redbook cd, or if they have sacrificed the bandwidth so badly that there is no hope.