Hey all - putting this here because I couldn't find any decent information via the main search engines for this particular issue so hopefully it will be useful to someone.

I have an Alpine ILX-650E head unit in both my work cars - a VW amarok and a 2000 TD5 Defender. The one in the amarok was installed by the car audio shop I bought that unit from and the only thing I've done is replace the head unit with a new one when the old one died - just unplugged the old one and plugged in the new one. The one in the defender I installed myself, but I couldn't find the park brake wire in the dash and couldn't be bothered running a wire across from the park brake light to do that, so I just left it off. Without the park brake wired in you can't access the main settings menu (to change the time, change the dimmer settings, etc...) and you can't set up a bluetooth device - I didn't care about any of that until this week when my phone started misbehaving because it's old (iphone 7) and the connector is a bit dodgy, so I didn't have tunes on my drive back from Brisbane the other day and it was annoying.

So anyway, after trying to find out how I could bypass the parking brake, or at least what that input wire was expecting to see (earth? 12v? who knows?) I could find bugger all, except for a couple of forum posts talking about using a special bypass relay kit. There were also forum arguments about not being able to just earth the wire permanently because it expected to see a sort of "on/off" signal like when you put an auto car in park, and some posts saying to wire it into the light circuit and then flick the lights on/off to get it to work (huh?).

I figured "stuff this" and just ran a test wire to a good earth and what-do-you-know, that's all it needs. So there you go - just run the park brake wire from the stereo harness to an earth and you will be able to use the settings menu and set up bluetooth devices, it does not affect the rest of the head unit functions in any way.

Cheers,

Adam