Well, I tried swapping the wires. That made the problem a thousand times worse. All the wires are hooked up right... I am thinking the problem may have somthing to do with my dodge antenna. Is it possible it's too powerful or the wrong impedance or resistance or somthing like that. It would seem that my "power bars" are about "three bars too powerul". When I get no receptioon at all, I still have two to three bars. When I have a clear station and all the bars are full, it sounds great, but if I lose just one of the bars, the station is impossible to hear. Very strange problems, and I'm not sure it will ever get fixed. I don't see any of the people that posted to this topic listing a solution to the problem (so I guess no one ever found a solution??). That makes be very sad...

MPELAZ summed it up very will when he said :

"Tuner kit looses trebles and stereo signal constantly, like an old analogic walkman would do in movement. RDS signal blinks and the broadcast is not constant. But, surprisingly, the 'power bar' is always full, even when near no station is recived ¿?
"

I don't see anyone posting that they every figured out why this is happening, but I don't have any other tuner module to compare it to... I wonder if they all do it, or if only the kits do it or what...

Also Alex 25 said the following:
"My tuner from pca shows the same effect as your one. The power bar is always much above the actual receipt. Even if I tune to a frequency where no station is broadcasting, I have at least two or three bars. And even if there is bad receipt of a station the power bar is full.
Could this be a hardware problem? (I don't think so, as I have double checked the assembly.)

For testing I (re)installed the orginal empeg tuner this afternoon. With this one I don't have this behaviour. I think the power bar corresonds to the actual receipt quality.
The overall receipt quality of both tuner are equal.
"
It strikes me as odd that we are all having the same problems of three bars with no signal at all. That we all experiance full bars with no signal at all (only on some stations). It is also very odd that when you do get a good station, sometimes if the station fades out, the power bars remail 100% full and sometimes they dip down.

I know the tuner module isn't supposed to work like this, and it isn't the wiring. I doubt it's the compnonents I soldered in because I spent 7 hours soldering and rechecking everything before I fired it up. I even took everything apart and checked all the wiring and all my sled wiring (because Tony suggested it may be the wiring). That wasn't the problem either, but I'd like to thank Tony for offering me help I'll take all the help I can get on this issue...

I suppose I will build up my second kit and see if this one suffers from the same problems as the first. If it does, I suppose I sent $400+ on two items that may not be compatible with my truck/antenna...

Im really not sure what other problem it might be?? Maybe a setting in the config.ini file? Someone mentioned in another thread that they though you could turn off the feature that mutes out the high end frequencies when the reception goes down... I don't know how it decides when to do that because my bars never leave 100% but the station keeps muting and unmuting the high frequencies. Does anyone know if you can turn that feature off or not??? I also noticed someone saying something about setting FM boost on an original tuner model to 6 and setting their tuner kit to 3. Why would they be different, and how do you know what to set them too???