For the love of....I don't know what the deal is with Amish and electronics. Many of us here have issues with the dash radio, whatever flavor you have. My coach came with a Clarion that probably had vacuum tubes it was so outdated. I replaced it with a Pioneer
AVIC-8201 NEX. This is not to get into the details of how well your flavor of dash radio works and its features. It's a problem RV's have with dash radios, so lets, get, started....
In your CAR you know when you turn off the ignition your radio will go off after about 15 minutes unless you use the accessory position. Radios are NOT MEANT TO BE POWERED ON ALL THE TIME. In a RV they rigged the wires so we could use the dash radio when parked in a CG. That's great EXCEPT dash radios especially modern day ones with computers in them for nav, satellite, etc. are NOT designed for this. They have something called memory leaks, short story is over time they degrade because they need reboots. How do you reboot an always on radio? Kill power, yes, but I personally never kill 12V power, I have no need to, I have Internet things in mine that need always on, I keep the inverter always on for the refer, I store on shore power, I have solar, etc.
Sooooooo, I've had problems where my dash radio will start getting slow to respond to switch presses and it will eventually freeze up. I bought a few kinds of switches with a plan to eventually add a on/off switch to make power cycling easier. I then learned of where to get rocker switches like Newmar uses thanks to Redbaron73 -
https://www.otrattw.net. As I got HWH Active Air which renders my TAG Axle on/off switch bypassed as it's part of their system controlled by their panel I have a spot to put a rocker switch. As you can see in the attached image I ordered a custom switch with DASH RADIO as the text. I also ordered one for Dash Cam and GPS as I'd like to get those wired in but that's for another day.
Most dash radios are alike in wire colors but you need to verify. The RED WIRE is 12V power. The YELLOW wire is also 12V power but for the radio's memory. You want to inline your switch to the RED wire. The yellow must not be touched or you'll lose your settings.
With that said the rest is easy, it's just an inline switch. These switches come to find out have backing plates for wire connectors to snap into which I did not order so I spliced into the tag axle backer but you can use normal type connectors too. Just a note to probably order the backing plate/connector for your switch(es).
Now I can kill the power when in storage, reboot if needed, or simply turn the radio off from this power switch when not in use just like turning off a car, unless you want the map/nav of course. Now I will no longer have to pull the dash radio and pull the power connector off and put it back on to power cycle and recover my frozen dash radio.
MOD: Adding a Dash Radio On/Off switch
Linear Mode
