Hi,

I have an official Empeg tuner attached to my series II player. This has worked fine for a number of years, though reception was poor compared to every other car for a given station in a given location, and RDS reception was marginal. Recently the tuner started to misbehave, basically it would have signal, then the signal bars would drop to zero, this would bounce around for a while and then the signal would drop to zero and stay there. The next time the car/player was restarted it would work for a while, start going up and down and then stop completely. Recently it has stopped working completely. This is true for AM and FM reception. Increasing the volume increases the hiss - almost as if the radio is tuned in to a dead station.

I pulled the player and tuner out this weekend and confirmed that the loom wires were OK (visually, not with a AVO meter), and confirmed that removing and replacing the antenna made little difference (the hiss increased on AM). The power light on the module is on and stable, so it appears that the tuner is powered OK, it just appears to not receive the stations at all and be permanently suppressing noise.

Any ideas? I read with interest the issue with the PCATS kits, i.e. the Coax to board connector - has anyone experienced something similar with the official radio? Before I take it back out and open it up I was wondering if anyone had any great insight.

SW version 2.00 - I know I should upgrade to at least hijack, but it has just worked for years and life keeps getting in the way. Only this failure has slowed me down ;-)

Thanks in advance for any input.

Alan

Although you should be using software version 2.0 final (or at least 2.0 beta 13, which is probably better if you use the tuner a lot), that's of course got nothing to do with your tuner issues.

It's good that you confirmed the wiring loom was OK, which would have been our first suggestion.

If there's a way to do it, double check that the antenna wire and the car's antenna is working as intended. You said that plugging and unplugging the antenna wire didn't make any difference, so that makes either the antenna wire or the tuner itself suspect. If you don't have another car stereo lying around to temporarily plug in, I don't know if the antenna wire is something you can easily test or not.

If you can rule out a problem with the antenna, then definitely crack open the tuner module and have a look inside. Maybe the jack that holds the antenna connector has a broken solder joint or something?

Beyond that, if you can't see anything visibly wrong with the tuner module, then it's probably time to send it to support or eutronix.

Thanks, the player is at 2.0 Final - i.e. the one where scanning up and down frequencies doesn't work from the front panel.

This is as I suspected, no obvious issue, and no known previous issues. I'll crack the unit open and have a poke around.

Thanks

Alan