The primary reason for getting Ziggy and making him off pavement capable is to get off the beaten track and explore. For that we really needs some maps, and these days that's best done with a screen. We've used cell phones in our side by side but an in dash screen would be much better. Also, we put a car mount set-up in Ziggy for our house/coach SiriusXM head. This works great on pavement but we've found the head jiggles out of the stand on washboard roads. There are a lot of washboard roads out there. For these reasons we decided to put in a new dash stereo/nav system.

We looked for a stereo that could accomodate SiriusXM and had Android Auto. The Android Auto will allow us to use cell phone navigation on the dash screen. This is great because we can use Gaia and OnX off road nav apps. Finally settled on a Boss BE7ACP.WX and a compatible SXV300 SiriusXM tuner. This Boss has wired and wireless Android Auto (@ Apple Carplay). It's one of the lowest level units that had the features we needed. Ordered through Crutchfield. I really like their installation guides, they make installations much more pleasant.

Tore into the dash where there are a lot of wires. Not as bad as I though it would be, the dash was easy to remove and replace. Still quite a bit of wiring for the new stereo. The picture below shows an early test. The reassembled dash is shown at the top of this page. Note the new plug on the right under the aux input. We lost the aux input but this new plug has a USB plug for wired cell phones and thumb drives of music.

The new antennas were put on the roof near the gray water vent. One is for SiriusXM and the other GPS. Not sure what the Boss does with GPS but it came with the stereo so I installed it. Since I had to wire the SiriusXM antenna the GPS wasn't any more work. During the process I added caps for the gray and black vent pipes.

To get the antenna wires into the cab I ran them down the gray vent pipe. Others have done this, mainly with solar wires, which is where I learned it's possible. If you ever wondered what's behind that plastic over near the sink in the kitchen let me satisfy that wonder. The first picture below shows what's behind it. Mainly the vent pipe, a number of wires going up/down, and some structure. I drilled a hole in the vent pipe and pulled the antenna wires through. Getting the wires to cooperate was a trick though. First tried to just push the wires down, no go. Then tried a fish tape but there are so many joints, with associated flanges, that it would not feed. Finally got smart. Pushed a string through the hole at the bottom and applied a vacuum to the top. Pulled the string right through. Once the string was there it was fairly easy to pull the wires through. The hole I drilled and the wires are also shown below. I caulked the hole and covered with a piece of metal foil tape.

From the vent pipe the wires were fed forward, under the door seal up and over the coach door. From there the route was under the cab door's floor cap and up behind the passenger side kick board. That got them under the dash. From there an easy route to the new stereo. I did have to add an extension for the GPS. The SiriusXM wire was long enough but not the GPS. The, now extra, wire was coiled next to the vent pipe. It would have been difficult to hide the plugs under the door seal. This coil, inside loom, can be seen below as well as can the foil tape over the hole.

And ta da, new dash stereo. We'll have to take a trip or two before deciding how well it works for us. But all the functionallity I envisioned is there and works. A good day all around.