mdemartino01

Got my Sportster installed by a guy that did not instill a lot of confidence. Should have left before he touched it. Now,,,the volume when the Sirius radio is receiving is about 25% lower than the standard sound system in my car and the sound quality is less. Is this right??? He hooked up an FM Direct Adaptor for a Delphi XM FM Direct Accessory... said he had to put it in because Sirius only runs on 6 volt and this would reduce the 12 volt to 6 volt. I thought it should be a straight install, tap into the cars power and bypass the cig. lighter connector with the same kind of direct tap I used for my radar detector. So he packed a bunch of garbage under the dash and stuck me for an additional $40 for the adaptor..Is this why the sound is not strong???,,, or did he really know what he was doing and I'll have to live with turning up the volume to get some sound out of this thing? Any comments would be appreciated,,, Thanks

i8piglet

I dont know about everything else, but as far as the volume goes, you can adjust the output volume in the sportster's menu. Maybe he just turned it all the way down.

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Piss poor speller, deal with it

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de

You might try turning up the Audio level on the Sportster. Press Menu, go to Audio Level Options, and turn it all the way up.

Michigan Made

I'm not sure why he put in the FM Direct Accessory. I think its unnecessary. On my Sportster install I hardwired into the fuse box and all is well, same idea as your radar detector.

This could be why your sound sucks. If you feel confident, reinstall yourself. I'm sure you'll end up with extra parts and better sound quality.

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dantodd

'

He is absolutely positively 100% wrong about the Sportster needing 6v. The sportster is designed to run on 12v.

On top of that he also doesn't realize WHAT the SkyFI FM Direct does. If you look at the kit it contains 2 pieces. One is the antenna box. This has 2 connections for the Car's Radio Antenna and 2 connections for the PNPs antenna. The other piece is an add-on cigar lighter plug. This allows you to use the power cord that came with your Sportster.

The good news is that the buy didn't actually hook you sportster up to run on 6V. All he did (assuming he properly installed the kit and didn't muck anything else up) is make you use the existing power cord instead through another lighter plug rathe than hardwiring it with a nicer cable that is easier to hide. Probably no harm done.

The scond box that he installed is NOT designed for the sportster. Delphi XM products send their FM modulator signal over the shiled portion of the XM antenna. The little box taps the power for the powered antenna to activate the injection relay and then taps the signal from the shiled and uses that to inject the signal directly into the radio's H/U.

On Sirius 2 and 2.5 gen chip PNPs (maybe gen1 too but I don't know) there is a jack on the car cradle which has both 5v to activate the injector switch and the RF signal. I don't know if the Sirius Antenna shield is used to broacast the modulator signal or not. However; the AGC voltage regulator on the Sirius PNPs are NOT designed to also drive the FM modulator injector at best this won't have any damage and may work. At worst you may blow out your radio's AGC circuit and/or the antenna. Most likely you will just see less sensitivity from the antenna because you are starving the AGC circuit and probably less qulaity (volume?) from the modulator by tapping an RF source that is either non-existent or sub-optimum for the job.

You should replace the delphi "antenna box" with the SATSWB which you can order directly from Audiovox. The lighter adapter is not going to do any harm but you may want to jsut replace the lighter and existing cord with a smaller, non-coiled cord that will make for a cleaner install.

Sorry about your troubles with this installer.