I’ve been hating having to plug my cell phone into the Aux jack to get streaming music and navigation from Waze through the speakers. It has required me pulling my phone out and putting it in a mount with a cord that hangs between my stereo and my phone. Getting out it’s difficult to get my phone back into my pocket until I’m standing up. I’ve dropped my phone a couple of times doing the dance with keys, phone, and any kind of thing I carried in my right front seat.
I searched for a while and was about to settle on a unit that plugs into a cigarette lighter and has yet another cord running up to the stereo. I’d still need to pull the plug out of the power since that’s not switched. I wasn’t really liking the idea of that solution. I continued searching. Then I found a thing on Crutchfield’s website. It’s the “Crux BTS-GM1X Bluetooth Interface” and connects to the factory XM unit and adds audio streaming ONLY. That leaves the phone ALSO bluetooth connected to my handsfree connection in the Tahoe for phone calls. Here’s the link for now: https://www.crutchfield.com/p_249BTSGM1X/Crux-BTS-GM1X-Bluetooth-Interface.html?search=Crux_BTS-GM1X_Bluetooth_Interface&skipvs=T
It came today and I unpacked it on my passenger seat.
That’s the whole thing. The black box does the magic, and the cable wires it in via the XM unit behind my glovebox. Oh and I can still use XM. This acts like another channel on XM.
It only took a second to release the glovebox so it tilted down into the footwell. I dropped everything into the oversized box my device came in.
It only took another couple of seconds to pull the plug out of my XM receiver. Another couple of seconds to connect the wire to the factory plugs and plug in that black box. I wire tied the box and wires back in and put all my junk (after a cleanup) back in the glovebox which simply swung back up and snapped into place.
After buttoning that up I turned on the key and selected XM from my tuner. I turned on bluetooth on my phone and located the new unit and connected to it. I was supposed to have to do some button pushing on the stereo to make it mate to my phone and select the streaming source but somehow it started streaming right away.
It works well. I’ve seen that the connection via bluetooth is limited in range. That’s okay, likely the farthest I’ll get from it is pumping gas.