Ok.. this is too weird.. hooked up CD player in my car...

[weirdichi]

I installed a CD Player, and everytime I turn my lights on, the antennae goes up. Anybody know off the top of their heads what I did wrong?

 

[Thegonagle]

Yeah. You didn't use a wiring harness adapter and you guessed wrong when you hooked up the wires.

 

[Omegachi]

probably crossed a wire. or the new cd player don't support the antanna switch although that connection exists but used for someother function for the new cd player, so when you turn the cd player on the signal to the antanna switch goes on too.

go test your wiring in the back of the cd player, fiddle around with it and you'll probably find out whats wrong with it.

haha, yea, you need a harness if you don't got one.

 

[Thegonagle]

<< haha, yea, you need a harness if you don't got one. >>

A little late for that if he already cut the wires inside the car. That's always a real bad way to try to save $9.

Edit coming. I'm going to try to help in a minute, instead of sitting here and doing the old Nelson laugh ("Ha Ha").

Edit: OK, first off, never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever cut the factory wiring of any car ever again! It's just asking for trouble of this sort, and worse.

My guess is that you have hooked up the "illumination" wire from the car to the amp turn-on lead in the stereo. Most after market stereos do not use the illumination wire. The illumination wire is used to power the internal lighting of the factory stereo, and dim the vacuum-fluorescent display at night when you turn on the lights. I guess that you must have both a power antenna signal lead and an amp turn on signal lead coming from the new CD player, and that they are not electrically separate inside the new deck. When you turn on your lights, power flows from the illumination wire, "backwards" into your deck through the amp turn on lead and out the power antenna lead to your power antenna.

It?s pretty important that you don?t use your stereo until you have fixed this problem, because when you turn on your stereo, the dashboard lighting circuit is actually drawing power from the amp turn on lead. This is bad. The turn on lead is designed to provide at most a few hundred milliamps. Since your dash lights (and depending how the car's wiring is designed, possibly the parking lights and tail lights too) draw significantly more than this, it is essentially grounding (shorting out) the turn on lead.

 

[Thegonagle]

Bump, cuz I updated my last post.

 

[weirdichi]

now if I just disconnect the wire to the headlight switch, I'll be ok, right? I wasn't planning on using the radio anyway.

 

[Thegonagle]

Yeah, I guess, but I would do my best to hook it up correctly.

The most important thing you need to do is find the wire from the car that is powered when the headlights are on, disconnect it, tape it over, and hope that the tape never falls off.