I’m not sure whether I’m obsessed with saving money or just plain cheap, so hold my beer and watch this! The original radio in the Bounder is more than a few years old, so the clock became invisible, I can’t find stations I’ve known for years and the speakers were scratchy sounding. So until I find new speakers and an antenna I decided to replace the receiver until I can bring myself to part with a few more dollars.

I found out that many units now come without a CD player, so if you only want to play MP3’s you don’t have to pay for that extra hardware. When we are between cities, the radio stations are hard to tune in. Since I’ve put all my CD’s on a shelf and ripped them onto a miniature USB drive, I can take that USB button into what ever vehicle we are travelling in, but not the RV until now!

It took a little work to map the wires to the new connector and I had to add some ground wires. Just to make sure the road vibrations don’t shake wires lose, I soldered and used heat shrink tubing on the connections. To my surprise, the sound was quite good, much better than I would have expected from a $100 unit, much less this $29 bargain. When the volume and bass kick in, the speakers do get a little weird but I can hear them on the road so that will give me more time to shop for good fitting replacements.

Amazingly the antenna is picking up stations just fine on the new receiver, so this receiver turned out to be a great first step. I’m so glad I didn’t go rushing into speakers and antenna at the same time (especially all that installation work). So our Bounder has almost become a magic carpet ride, like a cloud of sound we drift in the night. (Sorry, just had to add some corn)