Having problems getting power antenna to work in my wagon. I have fitted fairmont dash & all wiring & have fitted genuine power antenna. The antenna tested ok with power from the battery but doesn't work when wired to my pioneer cd player. I wired Dark Blue/red wire from the dash harness to the blue/White wire from the cd player this has 12 volts when the radio is on. I believe the Dark Blue/Red wire goes to the BEM & it controls movement via the switch on the dash. There are 4 wires on the back of the switch, brown (illumination), Black (-Ground),Yellow Black (Power from BEM),Red/Blue. What am I missing? I havn't wired the Brown (illumination) wire to the head unit nor the Dark Blue/Red (dimmer wire), as my head unit has no wires for either of these. Do the illumination or dimmer wires have anything to do with the antenna not working?

i thinking blue/white is normally "remote on" to tell a amp when the headunit is on, power antenna is normally solid blue. a antenna wire will only have 12volts when the headunit is on radio, a remote wire will have 12volts whenever the headunit is on. Does your headunit have a solid blue wire? what brand/model is it?


id be trying to get the antenna working without the switch at first. run the headunit wire straight to the antenna. i think the switch normally only controls the hight of the antenna (half or full hight)

and more importantly what model is your can... i was guessing 90s model falcon

Cheers Cam

I think remote cable (blue/white) is just a trigger wire producing small amounts of voltage, not 12V. There should be a power antenna wire specifically for the antenna (as fourL6 said...solid blue wire). Not 100% sure, haven't looked at my head unit wiring ever since i put it in 2 years ago.

Ok so blue/white wire is for amp on off , I don't have a blue wire coming from the stereo but not all the pin outs have a wire connected to them, there are 16 pin outs from the head unit but only 12 are used 8 for the speaker outputs one for + on all the time, one for + acc, one for - ground & the blue/white amp on off. The head unit is an older pioneer DEH-1350b from memory, I have Google'd info about pin outs for this stereo with not much luck. As for wiring the antenna up directly I'm not sure this would work, as polarity needs to be reversed to retract the antenna & as far as I know the BEM should manage this function.

I always thought that there is a third wire for the antenna which is connected to the remote? So once the head unit is on, it will tell the antenna to move.