Typical Jeep Stock Radio Problem Repair Options

Hello Daniel,

Often times with that generation of electronics and the abuse that vehicles get, it's the capacitors that fail. About 10 years is the expected lifetime for the kind of hot/cold cycles a dashboard experiences. Rip one apart and see if the oil has visibly leaked out of any of them. There'll be visible staining on the circuit board underneath them if they failed. Replacing the big power caps could very well bring them back to life.

Cheers

Thanks Daryl.

I figured there may be some issues with the capacitors or the circuit solder joints. My reason for the question is that most forums involving Jeeps tend to lean toward the CD player/radio combo being non-repairable.

I'm going to tear one apart and see what I can come up with. My basic reasoning for this repair is to avoid losing the CD changer. I'd like to just pop in my CD's and drive, versus dealing with an aftermarket deck, USB thingy's, and cell phones.

Cheers,

Daniel

I have the same problem on my 04 Grand Cherokee which I just purchased. Being a component level electronic repair technician, and noting that my screen comes on every now and then, I do not suspect capacitors but suspect a bad solder joint that is heating up and opening completely because of the damage to the circuit board. And FYI, not all bad capacitors leak. Some will just bulge on the top. My experience is that a very large number of my repairs, especially on power supplies, is poor quality solder joints.

Hey mike, i noticed on an old unit that stopped working, that there's a burn mark in the top left corner of the LCD, would a burnt out LCD cause the whole unit to cease functioning?

I also found that i still had my original burnt out factory radio/tape deck from my '99 Cherokee, and Frankenstein'd that with a replacement factory unit with a tape deck that didn't work, my original had a working tape deck when the unit died(the burnt out LCD display) i found the radio unit has 3 main components(lcd face plate, radio control board, and the tape deck) i 1st swapped face plates(didn't work)

Then i compared the two unit radio control boards, found the '99 circuit board had a few circuit pathways that were different than the 2000 model unit(i since got a 2000 Cherokee with no radio of any kind) bought a factory unit that looked like the '99's dead unit. So just swapping the faceplate onto the '99's unit, didn't fix it. Put the faceplate back on the 2000 unit & instead swapped in the '99's tape deck(it worked! ) the tape deck model number was the same for both & the tape deck still worked! So i combined the parts of two units, one with a working radio, with one that had a working tape deck.