I purchased two of the above, one for my Porsche Boxster 986 with a CDR23, and the other for my Dads Porsche Boxster 987 with a CDR24 – The installation on the CDR24 went smoothly and is working, though I was having some issues trying to get it working with the CDR23.

The Set-up
On the MOST bus with the CDR23 is a CDC4 6-disc multi changer and an amplifier. The Gateway 500 has been installed after the CDR23 unit. I have had to use an adapter as the car has the Yazaki plugs on the fiber optic leads instead of the Tyco ones that 90% of Porsches have.

The Problems
What was happening, was, in bypass mode everything works normally as it should. When switching over to the Gateway 500 mode, the CDR23 appears to lock up in whatever mode it was previously in before resetting the MOST bus. So, if the CDR23 was playing the single CD in the unit in bypass mode, when resetting in Gateway 500 mode, the CDR23 is stuck in CDS mode, still playing the CD, but the unit appears to be unresponsive to any button presses.

When switched to Gateway 500 mode, the connected iPod goes through the
motions of detecting the the Gateway 500 with the tick symbol, followed by the driving safety message and firmware indication screen and then reverts back to the iPods main navigation screen where I can browse and use the iPod as though it wasn’t plugged in. When switching to bypass mode, the iPod displays the Dension logo on the screen.

When in CD Changer mode before setting the Gateway 500 to iPod mode, the CDR23 still plays whatever CD was playing in the changer, sometimes I can even change the CD, although to start with the CDR23 reports that CD Zero is selected…

Sometimes when the CDR23 becomes unresponsive, if left for a while, the word “ERROR” appears on the screen.

As I have two of the units, I could confirm that they both worked fine in the 987 with the CDR24, so I can only assume that the Gateway 500 is not faulty. The Gateway 500 was delivered with firmware version 1.05 on it, I have since downgraded to both 1.04 and 1.00 and back to 1.05, none of them having any effect on the situation. The DIP switches are currently set to 0001 although when downgrading to the 1.00 firmware I set the switches to 0110 based on an old manual I found.

Diagnosis
Based on the fact that bypass mode worked fine, I can assume the fiber optic cables are fine otherwise the MOST bus would fail to function, power cables and the ext. switch are fine. And that the iPod detects the Gateway when switched over, the iPod cable appears to be ok.

After plenty of messing around with all of the components on the MOST bus, disconnecting things, moving things around, flashing firmwares, resetting the MOST bus after each change – It turned out that having both the Dension Gateway 500 and the CDC4 (CD Changer) was causing the issues, what with the Gateway 500 emulating a CD Changer.

The CDR23 is at the head of the MOST bus and is programmed to know everything on the bus and its location on the bus. When the Gateway 500 had its bypass mode switched off it was not disabling the CDC4 so that the CDR23 was then seeing two CD changers, didn’t know what to do, so crashed.

I’m not sure where the underlying issue is, though I’m assuming it is a firmware bug. Dension technical support was useless in the fact that they never responded to the three support tickets that I submitted. No response from the UK distributer neither.

I don’t have the benefit of the CDC4 any more, but with the 30GB iPod hooked up, I’m sure I’ll be fine! (The USB socket is also good for playing MP3 files stored on a removable storage device)