SteveInNC

My guess: "How do you tell the difference between fixed and mobile radars on the display?"

(I wonder if you could heat the plexiglass enough to bend it into a hood config?...could ruin a perfectly good convection oven too!

I used to mess with Plexi. A heat gun would be ideal. A hair blowdryer on the hottest setting might work, since this is thin stock. Sweep it back and forth across the sheet in close proximity where you want to make the bend. You don't want to heat the whole sheet at once, it will just get bendy all over. You don't have a lot of working time once it gets bendable and you stop heating, maybe five seconds.

The way pros do this is to use a strip heater, kind of like the heat wires in a toaster oven.

They can suck my left nut if they expect $400 (more than you can get the F700 for) just for a map update.

Absolutely... even BMW didn't try to ream me for anything close to that for a map update.

For XM, it's the GEX-P920XM, which as I recall, I paid about $75 for. I"m not too concerned. Even if SirXM goes bankrupt, the value of their business is sufficient that someone would buy up the assets/business, assuming that they don't just do a reorg (Chapter 11). If you're a creditor/lender to SirXM, you'd be boned though... By that same logic, I would not recommend paying for a year or "lifetime" subscription - in that case you are a creditor, and it's unlikely that you'd get that money back. I do the quarterly thing.

As an aside, I've had both Sirius and XM radios in other vehicles. XM broadcast technology is superior to that of Sirius, in my opinion. The XM satellites are in geostationary orbits, meaning that they stay in the same relative spot in the sky as viewed from your car. The Sirius satellites are in elliptical geosynchronus orbits, where they move above and below the horizon throughout the day, while maintaining roughly the same general direction in the sky. At least one of them is always above the horizon, but their relative angle to your car changes throughout the day, so you may get signal drops at various times of day due to buildings, trees, mountains, etc. Both networks also have a series of terrestrial repeaters to improve coverage in areas like the downtowns of cities. I've read that XM had/has significantly more repeaters in its network, which should mean better coverage also.

You can pay a bit more and get combinations of the normal XM programming combined with Sirius-exclusive programming. Nothing in that package particularly interested me though. When the companies merged, they combined many of their music channels (and eliminated many favorite variants across each system).

Before the days of bluetooth, wired car phone adapters used the Mute wire to tell the audio system to quiet down so that you could take a call. Most modern phones connect via bluetooth and use that instead. The hardware mod involves moving what was used as the Mute connection to a different pin on the radio. This pin, in combination with the parking wire, can be grounded to disable the code that keeps you from mucking with GPS settings/viewing video/etc, while the car is moving.

Well, I just installed my F90BT, and noticed that (in the three times I've driven since) it doesn't recognize my USB thumbdrive on start-up if I leave it plugged in. The USB selection is grayed-out. If I unplug the drive and plug it back in, it shows up almost immediately (I have directory updates turned off). This is while using the USB cable that is wired directly into the headunit, not via the iPod connector extension.

I have a different Pioneer unit (a DEH7000BT I think) in my Ford truck, and it always sees the same USB drive on boot up, so it doesn't seem that this would be anything inherent to this thumbdrive.

Heck, drive it there. My morning commute is longer than that. It saves you shipping costs and the inherent risk that it will get drop-kicked somewhere along the way.

I and several other people in a particular car group I follow have gotten them from 6ave for $500 (new) by using their Price Watch system. You tag interest in an item at a particular price, and they send you email if the price comes down to that (or more likely, they check your offer and decide to simply sell you one at your price regardless). I'm fairly sure that Ground shipping was free.

 

they no longer carry the f90bt's. or any of the pioneer double dins for that matter.

 

 

I just saw that, I wonder why?

Since they appeared to be blowing them out with pricing, perhaps they are anticipating the new unit(s), or perhaps it's part of a response to the general withdrawal of Pioneer from certain consumer lines. Given some of the complaints about the F700/900/90 in general, maybe they were getting too many returns. The only AVIC stuff that they still list is the on-dash or motorized single-DIN units.

Amazon still shows 15 merchants selling new F90BTs, with prices all over the place.

I have a theory based on how my GPS-enabled telescope works: after a reset, the unit loses your known position because it clears everything back to the initial out-of-the-box state. As such, it has to do all of the math and see more satellites to figure out where you are. If it already has your last known position, it takes less math to determine that you are still there, then compute the navigation deltas from that point.

When you shutdown the unit, it saves its current position for the next startup, so the next startup takes less time than the initial startup. In the case of the looong startups, that's probably because while it is generating the initial "here" position, you drive away, changing "here" , so it takes even longer to fingure out where it is. After a reset, if you were to start your car and sit there parked for a few minutes, it would probably sync up sooner.

My telescope does something similar: if you start it at roughly the same place, it will find "here" much faster than if you have moved it to a different place before startup. The owner's manual documents it as having this behavior too.

Thanks for the report. I'm installing mine this weekend. FWIW, I had a 2007 BMW with factory nav/audio. It took a bit of time before the music would kick in at startup on that too, so your 5-10 seconds sounds on par. I understand that iPod sources may take longer to come up on the F90BT, and also depend on whether you have it set to re-index the titles each time. The BMW nag screen stayed up until you hit OK via the control wheel. It became second-nature to press that as soon as I had buckled my belt. The unit was pretty much in nav mode at that point, no additional booting.

I and several other people in a particular car group I follow have gotten them from 6ave for $500 (new) by using their Price Watch system. You tag interest in an item at a particular price, and they send you email if the price comes down to that (or more likely, they check your offer and decide to simply sell you one at your price regardless). I'm fairly sure that Ground shipping was free.

FWIW, the fine print says "new subscribers only".

Not exactly what you're asking, but it seems that you could add a physical momentary button or switch to the Reverse signal line on the unit to fake being in reverse gear. According to the manual, the display unit automatically switches to the camera view when the Reverse gear is selected. I don't have one connected, so I don't know that this would necessarily work.

Ideally, get a double-throw momentary button. Connect the HU's reverse wire to the "common" lead of the switch, and the vehicle's reverse gear line (backup lights feed/whatever) to the "normally-closed" lead of the switch, and a twelve-volt (fused) feed to the "normally-open" lead of the switch. As such, when the button is NOT depressed, the unit behaves as normal: if you shift to reverse, the signal from the vehicle feeds to the HU reverse line, which does the appropriate thing. If you depress the button, twelve volts feeds to the HU reverse line, so it thinks it's in reverse regardless, and acts like you shifted into reverse. When you release the button, it all goes back to normal operation again.

Took you 5 days to remember you told her the password? Just kidding, glad you have it back.

Nah, it took him 5 days to remember he has a wife