The other day when the roomie and I were returning from dinner at Culver’s, I noted the odd antenna box sitting next to the rearview mirror in his truck and decided to look it up on my phone.
It turns out that it’s part of a Viper alarm / remote start system.
The roomie wants remote start for his truck and was naturally interested in this, wondering if it worked and if so if it was a simple matter of getting new fobs for it. But nothing I could find online for the system seemed to work – in fact it appeared to have no power. So, I started poking around under the hood and found a heavy gauge wire stuffed behind the battery that had been cut off.
And that led us to spending half the day in the garage tearing the truck apart…
Tracing out the power wire led to half of a subwoofer install behind the driver’s side rear seat, and that required unbolting and removing the seat to get to. So while the roomie rummaged around in the dash looking for the Viper box, I was tasked with removing the seat and then the remains of the subwoofer.
It took about an hour, but I was successful. The Infinity Reference 551a amp, the Hifonics Zeus processor, the Rockford Fosgate level converter, and about a mile of random RCA cables and speaker wire that was balled up under the carpets have all been removed.
It was the first car stereo stuff I’ve done since my PT Cruiser, and was kinda fun… And got me thinking about tuning up the 300’s audio a bit – even though it’s already pretty amazing.
As for theViper stuff – it had been removed from the truck. They left the antenna portion because it’s glued in place and the cable run through the headliner would clearly be a PITA to remove. So, like the sub, the previous owner pulled the easy to get to stuff and left the hard to get to for us to figure out.
And this led to the roomie finding out the Viper system was purchased and installed by BestBuy, and he has purchased and scheduled an appointment to have the new one installed.
Remote start is a powerful sales tool apparently. 🙂
Listening to "Running in the Night" by FM-84 and Ollie Wride