Car Radio Installations

Had a mini result just the other day. I was asked to test a couple of car radios, for a friend, that they had been given over the website Freecycle. I also have a relative who had been trying to install a new radio for some time, but was unsure of the wiring. I'd also helped in recent weeks to no avail. So we got our thinking caps on and tried again. Didn't work. Very strange, as it should have. We tried my identical model radio. Once again, didn't work. After many tests it appeared we had 2 malfunctioning radios [mine had stopped working anyway, so no surprise there]. The doubt was that they powered up, but wouldn't become operational. We started to question the head units, but something was naggingly wrong. Great, eh..?

So I brought along the 2 radios from Freecycle. The first one didn't work, as per usual. Ah well, a confirmation of our findings. Surprise, surprise, the next one did..! Aha... result. So we'd missed something. The first 3 radios used the ISO system of plugs, and the one that worked used an older method, and actually, to this old brain, a slightly easier on the head form of connection. It enabled us to understand the finer points of the wiring we were dealing with. The system had been botched by a previous owner, on the power side, and didn't reveal itself, even after iginition on/off voltage and continuity tests. I found that the installed 4 speaker system had also been wired incorrectly so that left was right, and right was left; back was front, and front was back; plus the speakers were out of phase, and had iffy connections anyway. Frankly, it couldn't have been much worse.

Having sorted all that, we went back to the original 3 malfunctioning radios. You have to appreciate that 2 of the units were within their guarantee periods, and so e-mails had gone off to the manufacturer. The upshot was that ALL the radios worked perfectly. So, suddenly we'd gone from 3 piles of junk, and a working radio with no sound, to a glut of fully functioning units. Mini result..!

This Freecycle website needs a bit of investigating too.