Mysterious Black Box on the Roof

Follow the wire and see where it goes? Then unplug/disconnect it?

It is definitely not oem, and it might be disturbing the seal on the weatherstripping where it passes through the top of the hatch.

 

xm or sat nav?

 

no, toyota would have run the wire through the roof, like the radio antennae.

 

No logo or text on it? How's it held on? Maybe something on the underside?

(Boy, site's running on empty right now: weird display problems, hit-or-miss trying to load pages.)

 

Because it is not hidden, it is probably not a LoJack-style theft tracking system.

I would guess some sort of non-OEM GPS system. Did his hack apply to the OEM nav, or was it really a separate nav?

 

It's the government, they're spying on us all!...or aliens. Definitely one of the two.

 

Serious response:
My best guesses are GPS antenna module/chip or satellite radio, or perhaps an antenna for another kind of radio (shortwave, etc.)

 

That's an old school XM receiver. It should have " ( ( ( XM ) ) ) " engraved into it like this:



I would NOT remove it if the aesthetics outside do not hurt. These are attached with double sided sticky tape and/or a magnetic base. The paint that it has been hiding has been shielded from the sunlight for however many years. When you remove it, I can almost guarantee it will be a different colour and that would annoy the crap out of me. Ontop of that, the weatherseal that the wire goes through has adapted. It was bent and disfigured so the wire could go up through it, and sealed around the wire. You remove this wire, and that weather stripping that has been bent for a decade, will not just spring back to like new, and most likely will become a brand new entry point for water leaking into the car. Why remove it???

I have a similar one in a similar spot for Sirius. I cancelled all my satellite radio subscriptions a few months ago, but those receivers are staying there.

if you do remove it for whoever knows what reason, you can sell them for a pretty penny. They are usually hard to find independent of the radio itself. When I broke one of my antennas I had to buy a whole new radio ($120) just to get the stupid antenna that otherwise only came in an installation kit for $150... But the new radio came with the radio AND the antenna... Go figure.

 

Our Garmin Satellite Navigation System doesn't need anything like that, everything's in the unit. You can just carry it around, for that matter. Yeah, some alternate communication device??

 

Yes the GenII Prius navigation system is a DVD based unit under the driver seat. The JBL amp goes under the passenger seat. You can even see the wire cutouts for it in the carpet if you don't have navigation.

 

Dang, missed that along the way. Thanks for the correction.

 

Possible. I have not personally disassembled the antenna to know exactly what is up there. But it is my understanding that the roof-mount antenna (stick or sharkfin) contains the AM/FM antenna, XM Antenna, and GPS Antenna. Apparently the built in XM antenna wasn't that great compared to a standalone and there were people who actually installed an aftermarket XM antenna on the roof, and spliced into the factory XM wiring to make that the used antenna. And then people like myself who had Sirius, the antennas were incompatible so I had to put an aftermarket on there.

The sound quality on most of the big stations are superior to most local AM/FM stations. Some of the talk stations are extremely compressed, but honestly they're compressed because very few people listen to them. Same reason why the Home Shopping channel isn't being streamed in 4K HDR to your satellite/cable TV company, it would be a waste of bandwidth.

Sirius merged with XM, screwed up many of the channels and DJ's, and then took away the stations I listened to. So after 10 years of paying them about $150/mo for 18 vehicles, I cancelled them all. Free internet radio streamed over bluetooth I can get the channels I want for free.

 

That looks exactly like the Toyota installed xm antenna that I had on my 2007. Except mine sat on a base that protected the paint.