There are a number of items packaged with the BTA1000:

• The BTA1000 itself.
• Microphone, with clip.
• Jack fixture, for securing the microphone jack when plugged in.
• 3 cable clips.
• 4-pin (2×2) microfit connector.
• 12-pin (6×2) Ford connector.
• Some odd shaped red plastic thing – No idea…
• Variety of pre-terminated cables.

This kit can be used in a number of vehicles, hence the Ford connector and pre-terminated cables. These are for constructing the radio mute cable, along with the 4-pin plug.

Considering that the Gateway 500 has already been installed, the addition of the BTA1000 was relatively straight forward, it only had to be plugged inline between the Gateway 500 and the iPod cable. The difficult bit is hiding the microphone somewhere, I didn’t really want it clipped to the sun visor, that’d look a bit wank.

There is a factory option of an in-car phone system when ordering from Porsche, but as you would imagine, it has a silly price tag attached to it. When you have this factory option, the microphone is located behind a grill to the right of the instrument cluster – So this is where I installed mine. It just clips out after getting your nails under the edges. It’s pretty dark inside that little hole, even with a torch I was struggling to see if there was anywhere the cable could be routed through, there’s not really much room in there at all. I have access to a See Snake, which is a camera and light on the end of a bendy tube with an LCD screen. So I messed around with that for a bit, feeding it in from under the steering column, looking for somewhere to route this bloody microphone cable. Not much luck.

The next step was to remove the instrument cluster from the dashboard to get a better look at the situation. This is held in with two Torx 20 screws, one behind the microphone grill and the other behind the hazard light switch. The cluster is then clipped in in a number of places, so takes a bit of rocking and force to set it free. Then there are four wiring looms plugged into it, three of them are removed by lifting the black lever upwards, the forth is clipped in and doesn’t really need to come out as there was plenty of slack on it. A warning though, the clips that hold the cluster to the dash are bloody sharp and risk damaging the dash surface. Also a tip if you’re planning on removing the cluster: Disconnect your battery first! See, I didn’t, and upon reconnection the OBC was spitting out all sorts of worrying errors: Failure oil level indicator; Refil washer fluid; Failure of fuel level indicator Drive to workshop. It took me a while to figure out how to clear these errors! Ooops!

Without completely dismantling the cluster, I could only really see one way in which was a small gap right where my finger is pointing to on the image to the right. It took a bit of jiggling to get the right-angled 3.5mm microphone jack though, I even ended up loosening the back panel to make enough room. There are only two Torx 20 screws holding it down. After removing the pop-shield and cable molding from the microphone, it was pretty much a perfect fit for the grill fixture that houses the original microphone. I fed the cable down through the hole in the dash where the wiring looms for the blue and green plugs go, then round the back and under the carpet behind the pedals over to where the BTA1000 and Gateway 500 live. Then I reassembled the dash and should have reconnected the battery, if I had disconnected it. The Gateway 500 also needed resetting by inserting a pin in the reset hole on the aux switch unit, I was getting inconsistent errors and glitches on the iPod screen before resetting.

As always with Dension, the manual isn’t exactly clear on how the thing works. To clarify the situation, to pair a device with the BTA1000 you have to be in the Gateway 500 mode, then select disc 6 track 6 to get to the Bluetooth Hands Free mode (track 5 takes you to Bluetooth Audio mode), then select disc 1 track 3 to enter pairing mode, which is active for 60 seconds. The pin it asks for is 0000. Though a pretty annoying process, its all easy from here on. The BTA1000 automatically connects to my phone on turning the key and switches to hands-free mode when receiving a call, I either have to press the ‘next track’ button to answer, or ‘previous track’ to decline.

If your phone supports voice dialing, you can use that to make calls though there is a number of buttons to press before you can do this if you’re listening to some music. My phone doesn’t have voice dialing, so I have to initiate the call on the phone, but upon connection it automatically switches to hands-free mode, and then back to the music upon termination. I’m currently using a Blackberry 8800 and I had to switch it to ‘discoverable’ in my Bluetooth settings otherwise it wouldn’t connect for longer than a second, even though it paired fine.

I didn’t install the radio mute cable for a couple of reasons. It’s there to mute any audio source that is not the Gateway 500 so that you can hear the phone ringing, you then have to select the Dension setup (CDC) on the head unit to answer the call. I rarely listen to anything other than the iPod, so I couldn’t be bothered with the extra hassle of installing it. The Becker head units used in Porches were also not documented in the install booklet and a number of people have said on forums that there is no radio mute function on MOST based head units – I have since downloaded the schematics for the CDR23 and there is in fact a pin labeled as ‘TELMU’ which I can only assume means Telephone Mute, though I have not tried it to confirm that assumption.

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)