OK GUYS THIS IS A FIX THAT WORKS
I NOW HAVE OVER 20 STATIONS
THANK KEITH WHEN HE GETS BACK TO WORK TOMORROW

Don't mind the pictures, camera suck's.

Ok All Keith is saying is you have to pull the radio one last time and snip the black ground wire coming out of the T Harness and going down to the Subwoofer. Tape off the lead going back up to the radio (radio already has a ground) Now run that black wire that go's down to the Sub "to Chassis Ground" and your done, takes all of ten minutes.

Now I also ran two seperate wires for the Power Source so YOU MIGHT HAVE TO DO THAT TOO, but do the ground first and you will get all your stations back, I DID.

 

i told you to try re-grounding the sub about a month ago.

glad you guys are finally getting this taken care of.

chris

 

guys what does this do??? do you just get the stations or does it help out with the performance of the unit as well. im talking about when you turn up the stereo 1/2 way it sounds great now when you go past it its like its power is cut into 1/2.anyone have this problem and does this fix that

 

watch out about pushing those wires in there with the fuses. Ive replaced about 50 F150 fuse panels since 1997 because of cell phones and fuse taps. It tends to spread the terminals in the box and cause intermittant loss of connection for the fuse.

 

you can buy Fuse taps that dont spread the fuse box as much as shoving the wires in.. Also I would recomend finding a better ground than that screw on the plastic dash...

Doug

 

FastAsL,
Why I didn't try that, I DON'T KNOW. Hit me next time I don't listen. I just went out for a while and the problem is absolutely gone, I got stations I never knew were there and NO STATIC

Buckeye, Mine sounds great and the louder you put it, the better it sounds ????

Now you guys are scaring me with that fuse box, Thanks for the Fuse taps Idea Doug. Anyone got a better place to pick up Juice, they sure dont make it easy do they. As for the ground I will search for a better spot, Thanks for the Idea's

Rob

 

Hi Rob,
Originally I thought my reception hadn't decreased with the sub addition, but upon noticing a dramatic change after shortening my wire harness I tried cutting the ground wire at the radio and regrounding it to chassis as per Kevin's suggestion. This alone did NOT solve my situation, in fact it often made reception worse depending upon the ground location. Finally with the engine running, and by using the radio tune button to literally count the stations that I could receive everytime I changed ANYTHING, I found my best ground combination came after soldering the two black ground wires coming out of the sub together at the sub and then pigtailing a short ground lead to a chassis bolt located directly behind the sub. This increased my station number from 10 to 15 ( received 21 without the sub in the system). After installing two of the suggested radio shack filters inline (looping the wiring harness sub wires three turns through each core) I increased my number to 20. I have not relocated the power supply wiring which well could help too.
In a nutshell guys each vehicle's system appears unique due to the amounts of RF emitted by the sub amp combined with the ground loops created by multiple grounds, so if you purcase this Clarion sub be prepared to try several mods to make it work successfully.

 

I installed mine 3 days ago, the stations I normally listen too (about 5 of them) all come in just as good as they ever did. I can't notice any change so far. Maybe that will change when I go on a road trip, but hey thats what CD's are for

I am sorry to hear about your guys problems though, I hope you get it worked out. I think your best bet would be to run the power and ground wires (twisted) for the sub as far away from the radio as possible, and don't use the ground going back to the radio re-route it like Rob is doing. Good luck!

 

shtngit,
Please explain that "looping part" again, The ferrets (RFI Filter)
isnt big enough to go through it 3 times, so I'm a little confussed.
The three I have hardly fit around the harness and are hard enough to get closed gong through it once ???

Here's Keith's last letter incase you haven't read it, maybe it'll help

I’ve done pretty much everything I am going to be able to on my own at this point, and I want to let everyone know what I have found.

My test setup was this - I had the sub set up directly beneath an alpine radio, using speaker level connections (no RCA jacks) and sharing the ignition power, constant power and ground of the radio. I tuned the radio to a station where the stereo indicator on the radio would flicker occasionally, and I had just a hint of high end static. As soon as I powered the sub up, the station faded and stereo indicator was gone on the radio. Strong stations seemed to be affected little, or not at all.

First thing I did was steal a ferrite core from a Sony XM Radio (because the Clarion ones still aren’t here, that’s a different story) and tried it on different places in the wire. I got the best results from having it located all the way up by the plug that says SOURCE (but still between the amp and source plugs). The closer I got it to the sub itself, the less it seemed to do.

I found that moving the wire loom around was making a lot of difference in my test setup, so I played with that a while. I discovered that if the wires got anywhere near the bottom of the sub where the speaker is, the noise would increase dramatically. When I routed them directly away and up, the noise was minimized. Also I found if I made one loop, as big as my fist, in the wire, reception would improve fairly dramatically. More loops made the situation worse.

I also removed the ground from the harness and applied it directly to the body of the radio. Doing this was the ONLY way I could ever get the sub to turn on without affecting reception at all. This still seems to me to be the best solution, as when doing this, and not doing anything else that I will talk about in this mail (other than keep the wires from under the unit) the reception was no different with or without the sub.

I have had this setup running for three days now. I received one report that the fix worked for awhile, then the noise came back in. I have not experienced this.

OK, now its gonna get weird. I want to tell you some other things I found on the off chance that it could help one of you. I was playing with different grounding spots and I discovered something I cannot explain. I connected a 16” of wire to the ground lead of the harness (without disconnecting the ground from its existing point). Before I could attempt to touch the other end of the wire to anything, I noticed the reception improved noticeably. It didn’t matter where I positioned it or moved it to, the reception was better. I cant explain why, never run into anything like it before. Touching this wire to the chassis of the radio or any other point made no difference either. Just to see what happened, I took the wire off the ground and made the same connection with the power wires, had the same effect.

Also the Harness end that plugs into the Sub has an extra ground wire with a ring connector. I found that ANY connection of this wire made the problem worse. I suggest that anyone with this wire grounded disconnect it before trying anything else.

I am trying to get in contact with Clarion to see when we can expect these ferrite cores. Seems a little ridiculous that we dont have them yet.

Hopefully the next thing you will hear from me is that the cores are shipping. Honestly, from the testing I did, grounding the sub directly and solely to the chassis of the radio seemed to be very effective and I suggest that to everyone. I also think that making sure the wires dont loop back under the sub, and that you put one loop in the wires would be advised as well.

If you have any other questions or problems, feel free to contact me. Please let me know once you have tried this and what the results were. I have many people asking me what kind of feedback I am getting, and I haven’t received much.

Thank you

Keith

Crutchfield Technical Support

techsupport@crutchfield.com

 

Hi Rob,
Thanks for sharing Keith's letter as I hadn't seen it and it will help me a lot! The Radio shack cores I purchased (that Sanjay recommended) have a much larger opening and less metal so looping the harness through three times is not difficult. It is one of their suggestions that they show in their diagrams that came in the package. Supposedly they say the more loops the better the RF filtering so I used three.
One thing Keith did that I didn't think of doing was disconnect the ground eyelet that came installed with the harness. This probably explains why hooking my ground back to the radio made things worse as I was creating a ground loop that way leaving the eyelet grounded to chassis. Why didn't I think of that? I need to try this first as this may be the ticket. I also found as did he that harness location away from the bottom of the enclosure improved my number of stations. Probably because it acts more like an antenna there. This became more apparent the weaker the selected station.
I'll keep you posted when I get time to experiment some more.
Unfortunately some gal rearended me while I was sitting at a stop light two days ago so the L has to go into the bodyshop tomorrow.
Geesh the vehicle is less than a month old and the first new vehicle I ever owned!
Jake