I’ve hit a brick wall

It’s quite worrying and I’m also now beginning to find this whole instrument panel project rather draining. After yesterday’s problems I returned to Malbec and working on the assumption that Alphatec had provided me with incorrect information, switched the connections around in the main under-dash headset sockets in my Savannah, so mic cables became headphone cables and vice versa.

And sure enough the radio then powered up as it should do, all of its buttons functioned normally and I could hear a small pop in the headphones when it finished booting. So it appears that Alphatec did provide me with incorrect information, raising the question of how much I would be able to trust them if I approached them asking for assistance with further problems. And further problems I do indeed have.

The radio is still dumb. It shows the RCV sign when it receives a signal but the headphones are dead. It doesn’t transmit when a PTT button is pressed and the intercom doesn’t work, so as far as I know, the mics are also dead. I have checked the wiring diagram and I’m still convinced that I’ve wired the system up correctly, so as there still appears to be a headset problem I’m wondering if my Alphatec Pro headsets are compatible with the radio.

In the set up menu, the radio detects the mics as being ‘dynamic’ but it still seems to think that there’s an external intercom, which of course, there isn’t, and I suspect that this anomaly is something to do with the mics themselves. I’m at the point when I don’t know what else I can physically do myself.

And I also don’t have a friendly radio man who I can call up and talk to, so it’s difficult to know where to go from here. I think that I’ll try contacting the radio manufacturer, giving them all of my details and seeing if they can point me in the right direction.

In the event that I don’t get help from there, I’ll have to locate a radio expert locally and get him to go through the installation. I’m worried if I do that, though, that I’ll end up ripping the whole panel back out again, with all that that entails, and you can imagine how I’d feel about that.