The perils of buying a headunit from ebay

[DITTRICH]

I bought a multimedia headunit off ebay. Looked okay in the pictures. Described as fully functioning. Cautious me arranged to have the headunit tested at an ice workshop near the seller's location in the presence of buyer and seller. Well Well; the tuner only increased in increments of 0.2mhz on fm: .1, .3, .5 and so on and nothing could convince it to latch onto Heart 106.2 . I paid a fee to have it tested and wasted some diesel. But the curious thing is the unit serial number identified it as a uk headunit, yet something wasn't right somewhere. So does anyone know whether it was just damaged or do fm tuners really work like this in other european countries?

Instead I consoled myself by having a Bury System 9 active cradle installed for my iphone and I bought a much cheaper tuner/bluetooth/usb screen without a dvd screen as a stopgap.

The kenwood ebay unit would have plugged straight into my duplicate satnav module and had bluetooth into the bargain. The big plus of the kenwood is the adjustable retractable screen which is a boon given where the radio slot is located in w124's and w202's.

And a plug for Absolute Audio of Amesbury (near Andover) who did a very professional job and provided me with some good advice.

 

[andy27168]

Hi,
I maybe wrong but I seem to recollect that American spec head units are like this, and couldn't be changed, though why it says it is a UK model god only knows.

 

[markjay]

Hi,
I maybe wrong but I seem to recollect that American spec head units are like this, and couldn't be changed, though why it says it is a UK model god only knows.

My thought precisely, though in the olden days there were poeple who knew how to change from US frequency to UK - but back then all that was required was a change of oscillator, these days everything is integrated....

 

[gIzzE]

Many Kenwoods allow you to change the FM frequency from Euro to US to Jap with button presses, the nav units for example are...


Turn power to the radio off.
Press and hold the reset button.
Turn power to the unit on (while holding the reset button).
Press and hold the Nav and eject buttons.
Release the reset button.
Let the unit power up and release the Nav and Eject buttons.

 

[gIzzE]

Non nav unit is done by...

To switch between tuning mode:
1- turn off the player
2- Press 1 & 5 (Tuner presets)
3- At the same time press SRC
Voila (Note all presets are removed when you do this)

 

[DITTRICH]

A veritable mine of information. My thoughts on this were that if he didn't mention this in the ad then he was trying to hide it as once the issue was identified, he tried to explain a workaround which he said he used (which didn't work). And that was just the tuner tested. The rest we never got to as I pulled out of the sale. And who knows what else might have been discovered...trust was destroyed by this point. Les