Finished fitting an Icom IC-450 UHF today. The unit is under the drivers seat and the mike is on a specially 3D printed holder. I’ll post pics of the mike tomorrow.
I got fairly close to actually hating the car for a while. I needed to remove the center console to run the mike cabling and it was fairly well stuck in place. Got it in the end.
2nd problem was finding an ACC power source. What a pest that was to find. Every other car was simple, grab a cable that’s hanging down, trigger a relay from that, plug in the UHF (or whatever) and it works. The D4 wiring is so nicely hidden and lacking the ACC function which made my life difficult. So eventually thanks to AULRO I found a spare fuse in the box being the glovebox. Off to the electrical shop to buy a micro blade fuse double mount. I come home elated thinking over outsmarted JLR... damn thing doesn’t fit. I spend 30 minutes trying to alter the stupid thing to no success and end up trying to squeeze 1 last power wire through the hole where the clutch would go through the firewall (that’s actually the last wire I can possibly fit in that hole by the way). I ended up wiring it to the aux battery without an ignition trigger.
Ended up buying 2 antennas for it. A big 2m fibreglass GME for remote travel and a smaller 450mm (or so) fibreglass GME for around town. The sales man from Electric Bug was a bit stressed about me mounting it under the seat, but I feel that if I’m in water deep enough to drown the UHF, with the amount of electric in this car I’m pretty sure that the UHF will be the least of my problems!
The smaller antenna works, we’ll find out if the bigger one works when I go to the Gawler Ranges on the weekend for a week/10 days with the 2 kids.
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