Coming soon to a Saab 9-5 near you....

[sgould]

No mention of Live Link in the manual, only TMC.

I tried the Tomtom equivalent "Live Traffic" on my old TomTom and it wasn't much use around London.  Once the route was blocked, all the alternatives blocked as well.  And now I'm retired, it's not so necessary.

But the software is updated from time to time, so maybe I will think about it when it happens.

[MikeIOW]

Nice!
.....& there willbe a DAB unit for sale.....mmmmmm........

[sgould]

Don't bank on it.  It stopped working reliably a few weeks ago. It was the final straw and made my mind up to change it all.

I suspect a failed connection in the power.  But I won't know until it's apart and I've checked.

[MikeIOW]

ahhh.....well, good luck with getting the unit in, looks fine!

[sgould]

When will it stop raining?

Met Office forecast said that it would be dry until 6 pm.  It started raining at lunchtime!  I stopped for some lunch and it's rained continuously.  To add insult to injury at 2.00pm while the rain was pelting down, the Met Office updated the forecast to be dry all day...

Anyway, I sat in the car and did what I could and got some power to the uninstalled unit, and it works.   So tomorrow, if it's dry, I may have it installed.

[Audax]

This is all internal work! Doesn't matter if it rains It was one thing when I backed out of doing a rear shock on the 9-5 due to weather but you've got no excuse 

[sgould]

I have got an excuse!!

I'm old and I don't bend well!!  I had the door seals off to take down the A pillar trims to get the old microphone out.  I also need to do a mod to the aerial in the sharks fin hole, which means doing the same thing around the rear tailgate.

And I have 800 miles to do this weekend.  London to Yorkshire for a family funeral.  Then straight to Cornwall for a long arranged event, then home.  Tomorrow is the last chance.  SWMBO has spoken!!

[sgould]

I took a quick picture in the dark, just before adding the last lot of connectors to connect it up to test!!

 




Tomorrow will be shortening up and pushing into place and hoping it all still works.

The sound quality already seems to be clearer than the Denso unit was producing, and that was without any set-up and with a big hole in the dash.  Apart from one broken wire, I could plug the old unit straight back in, and it should work, as I have just teed off the existing cables, since there is no pre-made harness available anywhere.  Lots of Scotchlocks!! 

[CitTone]

A stark demonstration of why I still have the standard AS2 and a road atlas.

[philg]

So do the scotchblock connected wires end up in the ISO connector to plug in the headunit?

I'm still thinking of a way to make a 'proper' harness to plug it in rather than scotchblock!

[sgould]

I would have loved to use a proper harness, but there isn't one for the 9-5 with the OE satnav.  There's one for fitting a new unit in place of the radio. The connectors are completely different.

The Kenwood unit has alternate speaker outlets.  There are eight speaker wires via the ISO, but they are no good for the existing amp, so I used the other set of pre-amp outlets rated at 2volts, which work with the existing amplifier.  So eight of the connectors are ones that would be there anyway.  Straight crimps would be neater, but I would have had to cut off the original connectors.  I didn't want to do that, just in case it all went wrong.  But it's an option for today if the space is tight.

There are 17 wires to connect....

8 "speaker" pre-amp wires to amplifier
Battery
Ignition
Lighting
Aerial trigger
Earth
Radio aerial
DAB Aerial
Microphone
iPod/iPhone/USB lead.
So do the scotchblock connected wires end up in the ISO connector to plug in the headunit?

I'm still thinking of a way to make a 'proper' harness to plug it in rather than scotchblock!

It's not as bodged as it looks.  The blue stuff is either insulating tape securing the push-fit RCA/phono connectors, or blue masking tape labelling all the connections.

[philg]

I didn't mean to say that it was bodged just that it must take up a lot of space that isn't there behind the headunit. Where having a more OE type install by making a harness may reduce on the amount of wire etc behind it while still allowing to return to the OE unit.

How have you wired the high and low connections to the speakers? is one + and one - for the phono connectors? if so, which way round is it?

[sgould]

Speaker outlets are six in number.

Left and Right for each of: Front, Rear & Subwoofer.  I haven't used the subwoofer ones.  And the RCA's do the + & - for each outlet.

The Saab has a balanced feed to the amp, so I fitted some ground loop isolators.  A bit bulky, but when I forced the aircon unit back in it compressed everything nicely!!

Out for a test drive this evening.  Only minus is that the "tuning" knob on the front has dropped of and I cannot findit anywhere.....

But it seems to work, and you can "tune" the front colours with separate RGB adjusters so that the colour matches the rest of the car.

[sgould]

It all seems to work!

Just need to get the auto dimming working.  Maybe I've used the wrong source of power.  It sort of worked to start with, something set wrongly, probably...

[MikeIOW]

Impressive cables!  And to a numpty like me, scary.....I'm with CitTone on this!
Hope the final push works a treat!