bob2200

After 6 years of getting ideas on this forum and thinking about it, I finally did a permanent installation of XM Satellite Radio. Many thanks to those of you who gave me many of the ideas I used.

I described my top-of-roof satellite radio antenna installation several weeks ago. The following describe the satellite radio installation itself.

bob2200

I used the XM Commander model, which has a separate display unit. These are no longer manufacturered, and I got a NOS (new old stock) one on eBay.

The first step is removing the trim. The upper-left photo shows the wood trim removed. You gently pop it off. It is just attached by tabs through those slots you see in the photo. The radio is removed by just 4 10mm bolts, two of which you see in the photo on the upper-right. The tabs holding the radio at the top are shown in the photo on the lower-left.

To be on the safe side, I purchased a spare wood trim assembly from a junk yard. That turned out not to be necessary. I later unplugged and removed the wood trim and radio (for reasons described later).

bob2200

This is the display unit, rear and side view. I attached the mounts to the display unit using epoxy. (The green material is a fiberglass/epoxy resin material used in making upper-end printed circuit boards.) I later decided not to use the nuts with built-in nylon locking, but just two sets of regular nuts and lockwashers.

bob2200

This is a view of the XM Commander satellite radio. The jack on the left is for the display unit. The middle two are audio output. The jack on the left is power. The antenna jack is on the rear.

bob2200

On the left is a view of the line preamp, which I added later, after determining that it was needed to boost the satellite radio audio level up to that of the other inputs (e.g., radio, CD).

The way I wired it up, I need to turn off the XM radio when listening to the other inputs. I use the tape input selection and put a audio-in-through-tape device in the tape drive (with audio leads clipped off). I could have also run blank CDs in the CD-drive, but this way I can alternate with the CDs and I never used the tape drive anyway.

From the XM radio, I route the audio through the line pre-amp and then to the Ground Loop Isolator, which is a pair of audio transformers that converts from unbalanced to balanced. From there, I tap into the audio leads as described further on in the description.

bob2200

This shows the connectors I used to connect into the sound system. The photo on the upper left show the model numbers. The upper right photo shows how they come, before repinning and trimming. The photo on the lower left shows the repinned connectors. The lower right shows the addition of a constant 12v lead when I discovered that my XM radio asked for both switched and unswitched 12v. Note that there is no splicing into the Lexus wiring.

bob2200

This shows where a ground down a ridge in the wood trim assembly to get the best fit possible. It would have been OK otherwise, but it fits a little better this way.

bob2200

This shows the wiring at the rear of the radio. The two connectors toward the left are the ones used. One is power and the other is audio. I found out the hard way that the Toyota connectors fit the RX radio connectors, but the Toyota connectors don't fit into the RX radio. So, I had to remove the radio from the car and trim the top plastic of the Toyota connectors until they fit into the radio.

I recently did some cleaning and lost the pinouts of the connectors, but they have been described numerous times by others on this forum.

Let me know if you have any questions/comments.