Car Stereo in the CJ

I had bought a bargain of a stereo off ebay -https://www.chinavasion.com/china/wholesale/Car_DVD_Players/2_DIN_Car_DVD_Player/2-DIN-6.2-Inch-Universal-Car-DVD-Player/

The reason for buying is the newer CJ Lancer I bought (we had another smash- which wrote off the CH Lancer – that car was a great car, towed a fair bit of waste, took the worst of the worst of the kids as well), – the new car didn’t have bluetooth (Damn!).

So to resolve that issue, the new stereo installed, I decided to give it a test run – and the radio was fine, tick. The MP3 functionality worked – I won’t give that a tick though, the “Random”function is a pile of crap – each time I hit Shuffle, it goes back to the first track, and when the car is power cycled, or restarted (say after waiting at the shops), it’d turn shuffle off, and you end up with the predictable situation – crap. So No tick there – future solution to come – firmware hack!

The microphone on bluetooth calls was absolutely garbage – I could hear them talk, but they couldn’t hear me – I had to shout basically – so the whole point of the stereo – to allow calls whilst travelling was wasted. I wasn’t going to bin it though – I decided to see what I could do to fix it, after a few iterations on part and circuit combinations, I tried settling on cutting it’s internal mic circuit and using a Jaycar mic and an external PCB. This turned out to be crap, because Jaycar’s microphone doesn’t publish it’s sensitivity – (-69db! – it might as well be a contact mic, it’s all it was good for!).

The next mic I found was from my second favourite spot to buy stuff online (ebay is cheaper for most things, RS is very very reasonable) I considered several of their microphones and settled on one that was -42dB.

Today I merely took the parts I put together for the first go with the Jaycar mic, and substituted it for the RS mic – and it works as one might expect it too.

I mounted it in the location the CJ Lancer seems to have built for a microphone, under a long trim section so the install is nice and clean.

It runs Windows CE, so all is not lost in terms of fixing issues (like the ISUZU logo on the start up screen, WTF were those chinese idiots thinking – only ISUZU owners would buy them?)..