i bought an alpine cda-9815 hu with lucid's harness... and everything works fine... but whenever i turn off the ignition without turning off the hu... all my presets and options are lost. does this happen to everyone or did i just make a faulty connection somewhere? thanks for the help!

 

hrm. sounds like a faulty connection...

there should be two power lines for the head unit... one red and one yellow. the yellow should connect to an always on and the red to a on w/ ignition. on Lucid's harness, the colors should be the same.

since you're losing your clock settings, i'm guessing the yellow line is improperly connected or has a blown fuse.

check 'em.

 

I just installed an Alpine 7894 last month and am still working on the rest of the instal. If Alpine kept the same logic the red lead goes to the ignation switch and is really a radio enable. The yellow lead on my radio had a 25 Amp fuse and its function is memory back up and main power. This lead usually goes to the battery. I suspect this lead has no power when the ignation is off. Either run it to the Battery or the the fuse box inside the car. The comments that Crutchfield make is you need a thick gage wire as well as the radio install kit.
You can get by with the OEM radio wiring if you run external amplifiers and don;t have a changer powerd by the HU (mine is) I ran the yellow wire from the new plug directly to the battery but need to improve the connection. You can see a writeup on my installation further fown the electronics list. I will add to it when the job is finnished.
Andy

 

With Alpine HU you must run a power line directly to the battery. If you look in the manual it should tell you to run a 10 gauge(if I remember correctly) power wire directly to the battery, if you do this you should have no problem as regards losing the presets.

 

While I was connecting the wires that i crimped I mixed up the red and yellow wires... oops but now it works perfectly! damnnnn its nice... next i gotta match the audio and temp control buttons to blue... hmmmm