Just put a new radio and antenna in my '98 Legacy Outback, and I'm a little annoyed to find that the power antenna deploys whenever the head unit is powered on, even if I'm just using it to listen to a CD or mp3 (got one of those fancy units with a built-in SD card reader).
So I was thinking about splicing a switch into the wire that controls the antenna. I was wondering if anyone had tried this and had any advice/warnings as to the liklihood of this plot of mine succeeding.
Thanks.
All you'll be doing is cutting the flow of current to the motor.
The caveat is that you may have to power the head unit off and back on again to raise the antenna.
I can't remmember what head unit I had, but it lowered the antenna whenever a cd was played, and raised it again when the radio was turned on. I think it was a Sony, IIRC.
A switch in series with the antenna wire will work fine. I'm not sure "Hach" is correct when he says the radio will have to be cycled when you want the antenna up. I believe the antenna line on our old Outback stayed high for as long as the radio was on unless I put in a CD... I thought the antenna retracted when I put in a CD...we had a '98 also.
So here's how it shook out:
I managed to find a suitable switch at Home Depot (I tried Radio Shack first, but the clerk seemed to think I was crazy coming to Radio Shack to buy an electronics component), and tried to wire it up.
It was fairly easy to get the switch connected, but in the process, I knocked all the speaker lines loose.
So I popped out the radio and reconnected them. But in doing so, the lines to the antenna came out, so I hjad to take it all apart again. THis time, I connected all the wires with scotch clamps, and clipped on an extension to the antenna lines. THen I drilled a hole in the lower part of the dash and mounted the pushbutton switch. It's in a slightly awkward place, but it was the highest I could reach without disassembling the entire dashboard.
Unfortunatel,y the process of making sure all the speaker wires were still connected required that I leave the radio on for quite a while, and the battery went flat.
A jumpstart later, and everything worked. I can now lower the antenna manually by pushing the button.
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