bnuk

Anyone who lives in the north will appreciate this. hondas have this wonderful feature of a retractable antenna, however in cold weather the antennas don't move so well and there must be a plastic gear inside the mechanism somwhere cause after a couple of times getting stuck the antennas are never the same and you can hear them grinding away as they try retract. my roomate's accord did this and it just got steadily worse until it only moved like 2 in and i've noticed of other honda's around that have this same problem. (mid-90s accords and integras for sure.

So as soon as mine started doing thisi decided to do something about it. This was done on an integra, but im sure it will work on most hondas. For those of you who have wired amps to stock honda stereos, you know if you tap into one of the wires coming out of the stereo you can use it as the remote turn on for the amp. this is the signal that tells the antenna to go up. constant 12V = go up and stay up, 0v = go down and stay down. This wire is in with the power, light, and other random wires (as opposed to the speaker wires.) i forget the exact color/pattern but it is the smaller of the two yellow wires. i just spliced in two wires and ran them around the gear shifter (under the plastic console thingy using a coat hanger) and up to the console. I bought a little automotive switch and cut a hole in one of the squares that pops out of the center console and stuck the switch in there. It fit perfect and looks good. you want this switch to interupt the signal to the antenna so run one wire from the radio to the switch and the other from the switch to where you cut the wire. Then you just hook up the wires and you can now control the antenna, if it the switch is the antenna down will still go down when you turn the radio off, but if you are just playing a CD like i do 95% of the time you can keep the antenna from always going up and down, its also kinda nice to keep it down cause i know on my integra the antenna is freaking huge. note by doing it th way you are not cutting the power to the antenna you are just telling it to stay down, so still works normally.