Small update but good news. I have the USB slot working now...although I can't tell you why it started. I suspect a poor solder joint or possibly some problem with the slot itself. I did use a different USB stick and that might be the answer. The one I was using before was a larger capacity and this one is 1 GB. The micro sd card quit working, but that turned out to be a failed card. And a dipole antenna seems to work fine although I suspect a vertical antenna might be just as good or maybe better. Both will work. There are FM station pre-sets in there but I can not figure out how to set them for a particular station. Looks like there may be as many as 30 or more pre-sets, accessible via the remote unit...you enter 001 for P01 and if you scan pre-sets it will scan them all, playing a bit of whatever is there. And I figured out how to pair and activate the bluetooth cell phone function. Talked to my wife very clearly with it. Now I am trying to see if the phone will transmit (maybe MP3 or podcast-type files) back to the thing so it could play through your speakers. I've never done that before, so this part will be a learning process for me. I need a 10 year old around here. And maybe it is just me, but needing a cell phone to make your radio play a file seems incredibly backwards to me. Something a career politician would think made sense.
One thing about the bluetooth function and the telephone. It seems to work best when you can hit the pause button as soon as you hear your cell phone ring...but there isn't a pause button on the face plate of this one. I will be receiving different styles of these...some use this same circuitry (which I applaud for simplicity and curse for lack of available data) and some which use different chips and face plate buttons (another little mystery for us). Some of these have the pause button on the face plate, however I probably will not get these until early to mid August. You can use the little remote control that came with it, but that's less convenient in my mind (a distraction which I do not like while driving) and I noticed if I let the phone keep ringing the little thing will eventually answer it. I visualize a tiny transistor imbedded in one of the chips finally saying in a voice like Yosemite Sam "ok, doggone it. I'll answer the blasted call." Personally I would have built into the circuit an instant receive/interrupt/override feature for bluetooth phone calls, but apparently they didn't. Or at least I haven't figured it out yet.
~ Jon 1952 1/2 ton with 1959 235 | T5 with 3.07 rear end
