In Japanese and some German vehicles, this was fairly simple as both of the components or radio & pocket were affixed to a "bracket" through the screw holes on the side of the radio. You would just take out the trim bezel, remove the 4 screws holding the radio brackets in, then viola-the radio & pocket with brackets affixed would come right out of the dash. Over to the bench with new product(s) in hand. Line them up with the old radio, remove the old radio from the brackets, slide the new radio between the brackets, screw in the new radio, then put back into the dash. Sounds easy.
Now to what most of you guys are dealing with. Great ideas, but won't be nearly as easy. Your vehicle's radios/cd players aren't mounted this easily. If you aren't willing to do some filing of a trim bezel or some modifications to a bracket or kit IT AIN"T GONNA HAPPEN!
Not to toot my own horn or pat the back of your local installer, but there is actually a reason why you get charged to install a stereo. You bring it to a shop, pay whatever amount of money, and expect it to work perfectly and look good too. There is an art to it, most of the time requiring some form of modification. If you're worried about putting back to stock, buy a second trim bezel so you can replace to one you filed down to fit the Pro-2096.
I will vouch for this. If you look closely at the high resolution photograph of my install of a Uniden BCT-15, you will see where I had to use a box cutter / X-Acto knife to shave away slightly in the fascia panel, because the faceplate of the BCT-15 is too big.
Here's what the completed setup looks like:
The BCT-15 doesn't include screws for the
ISO 7736 install. (Specifically, the manual says "leave it to a professional" if you're not using the DIN sleeve, but it wasn't too difficult to do myself. A professional might have had the tacit experience to make it slightly prettier though.) Fortunately, I had screws from an old 3U rackmount computer that fit perfectly. I also had to file down four "nubs" (or "dimples") there were on the rack plates that screw onto the radio -- then the plates screw into the car. Furthermore, I had to sand the bottom lip of the
spacer so it would fit. I also had to sand the top lip of the cup holder tray so that it would still pop in and out smoothly. (Sand a little, then test... then sand a little more, then test, until it
just fits. Be patient doing this.)
I used the included (with the BCT-15) 3-wire (red, orange, black) to draw DC power from the car. (The molex-like plug that goes into the BCT-15 itself is a standard CB power cable plug.) The wire included in-line 2 amp fuses for the positive and dimmer lines.
The positive (red) I took by running it under the steering wheel (behind the vinyl dash) over to the internal fuse box hidden behind the storage box on the far left side. I crimped it into an "A-line" (HHH) which taps into a fuse there -- these A-lines are about $5 at an auto parts store. (Originally I wanted to tap into the 15A fog lights, but that didn't work, so for now it's tapped into the 15A auxiliary... although I also use that for a 175W power inverter. Would have preferred to diversify my current draw and not risk overloading the aux.)
The ground (black) I got a box of O-ring spades (14-16 gauge, also at the auto parts store) that included heat shrink wrap on the end (translucent blue), and crimped that onto the ground line. Finding a ground was tricky, but eventually I found a metal frame in between the glove compartment and where the double-DIN is that had a screw that other things were using as a ground. That screw seemed to difficult to get to without disassembling more of my dashboard, but that metal framing did connect to the metal rack that held my cruise control unit (located beneath the double-DIN, angled behind the ashtray / cigarette lighter), which has two screws holding that in place. So I used one of those screws as the ground, and it seems to be fine.
The dimmer line (orange) I was able to use from the wiring harness since my aftermarket head unit doesn't have a line to receive dimmer feedback. This involved soldering the leads and covering that with heatshrink wrap, as was done for all the other head unit wiring when I installed that.
For an antenna, I'm using the stock (whip?) antenna included with the car.
I would greatly appreciate recommendations on a direct replacement "stealth" antenna I can use instead that's more suitable to scanning. I don't want to add any extra antennas.
I'm using the
SP-1300 splitter/combiner, with adapters I was able to pick up from Radio Shack: one Motorola (female) to BNC (male), for the input; two BNC right-angle adapters (because of depth restrictions, one on the scanner and one on the antenna input for the head unit), one BNC (female) to Motorola (male) for plugging into the head unit, and a 3-foot RG-58 cable (with male BNC ends) connecting the splitter up to the head unit radio (which has the aforementioned adapter to male Motorola plug). So the Motorola plug of the antenna goes into the adapter to BNC which goes into the input of the splitter; one output of the splitter goes into the right-angle adapter into the scanner, while the other output goes to a cable up to the antenna port on the head unit.
This was installed in a
eighth generation Toyota Corolla (E110).
I was originally worried about the BCT-15's speaker being loud enough to hear over the car stereo, especially with the
speaker muffled / hidden behind the dash, but the built-in speaker of the BCT-15 is plenty loud, and it's great having it
KISS and independent from the main stereo system.
I can leave the volume knob set to 2/3 and I'll hear it over the loudest I'll ever play the stereo; also the scanner starts and stops just fine when the power is cut out from the ignition. So all I ever have to do is start my car like normal, and the scanner starts up automatically within a few seconds.
I'm mostly using it for background scanning on Police, DOT, Highway Patrol, BearTracker, and WX warning alerts. So I wanted it to
supplement my normal music / radio listening.
In the future I'd like to add a Garmin GPS 18 serial input (DB-9) all hidden under the dashboard so that the BCT-15 can automatically make a record of "dangerous crossings" (i.e. speed traps), and automatically configure the states for me instead of manually setting it.
I hope other people find this post helpful, because I had to do alot of hunter-gathering of information to work all this out, plus a little thinking it out for myself. Prying off the panels to work behind the dashboard would have seemed intimidating if I hadn't already gone through it to
replace the head unit according to step-by-step instructions provided by Crutchfield. I also did alot of reading on these RadioReference forums (thanks everyone!)
All photos in this post are licensed as
Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA) and hosted by the
Wikimedia Commons.
(I do wish the
RR wiki also licensed its images with
Creative Commons / GFDL so they could be shared with Wikipedia.)
p.s. I also wish that cosmetically my
green clock,
blue head unit, and
red scanner could all agree on
one color. But this was secondary to the features and costs of the car, head unit, and scanner respectively.
