UAD in a MY18 car with the ICTP/IMC system

MajorTom

MajorTom

New member
Since one of the remaining good online features in ICTP - the Spotify app - seems to be dying I thought it was time to bite the bullet and get the UAD Carplay/Android auto kit installed. There's not that much info out there about installations in the facelift cars with the last ICTP 8" system so it wasn't as obvious and straightforward as I thought it would be.

I don't have two left hands and am no stranger to similar installation jobs, but it was honestly speaking a bit of a pig of a job. Dismantling the centre console and taking the screen out was a breeze but the issue in these cars is to reach the power connector of the headunit behind/between the seats. The way to do it is to partially remove the carpet trim behind the (UK car) passenger side seat to be able to reach the head unit power connector from the side there, and even then it's rather tricky.

Another thing to keep in mind is to remember to set up the dip switches on the UAD device correctly. I expected them to be correctly set up out of the box, which turned out not to be the case but that was actually an RTFM fault by me.

Still early days but it works brilliantly so far. All wireless and it's nice to have some voice controls in the car now. A nice thing about the setup with the IMC system version is that all OEM features including the satnav are intact. Carplay pops up automatically when you start the car and your phone connects wirelessly, but you can switch between the UAD unit and the standard system any time with a long press on Home.

So if anyone with a MY18 car with the 8" system wants carplay the UAD kit seems to be a great alternative to having the OEM 10" screen installed and coded.
 
Sure, this is the one: https://unique-ad.co.uk/product/wir...d-auto-interface-for-jaguar-f-type-2017-2018/

Took the car out for a good blast this evening to get a bit more familiar with the kit and it works brilliantly. At first I had issues with Google maps and Waze lagging and losing orientation but that seemed to be because my phone in the centre cubby was lying face down with a magnetic case plus another electric device on top of the phone. When I turned the phone over and put it on top of everything else the GPS connection was flawless.

A couple of observations after some more use:

- You need to add a ground loop isolator to the audio connection. I've seen two other guys with MY18 cars who installed the same kit and needed to add one. Not a big deal and one of those only costs a few quid. In fact I would probably not have noticed unless I had read about it online and only noticed it because I specifically checked this after installing the kit - if you have no sound on and turn up the volume a bit with the UAD kit audio on you get some static hiss.

- Having installed the unit very slightly affects the display image quality of the OEM screens. I think you need to have a bit of visual OCD to notice, but there's a new ever so slight glow around the pixels, like a bit of edge sharpening would have been applied or similar to a touch of chromatic aberration (for those into image editing or photography). I don't think it makes anything look worse and the OEM feature graphics just look slightly sharper than before. Logical I guess, because a tiny bit of image signal strength could get lost when it's fed through the UAD unit.

- When it comes to navigation it's really good that the factory satnav is still there because I think the last ICTP satnav is really good and so much better to use than any CarPlay based navigation app except that its live traffic info is rubbish and there's no live sharing of cameras etc like in Waze. This is no surprise because I've used CarPlay loads in different cars and have always been baffled by how over simplistic it is compared to any modern OEM satnav. On upcoming road trips I'll probably still mainly use the OEM satnav but run Waze in parallel in the background to check traffic conditions and get warnings about cameras etc.
 
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