A good friend wanted me to help him with installing a PCCM+ into his 03 911 Targa, replacing his factory Bose system with nav. Thought I'd give you a quick recap in case you're thinking of doing this upgrade to your Boxster. Supposedly "plug & play". Many of the items are plug and play, but some are not. AND there is very little directions on how to do the job. Lots of YT vids and Rennlist threads that get you 80% there, but no specific install manual. That might be because Porsche wants you to have them do the install for you ($$$) and / or the radio is so universal there's no way to discuss all the variations that exist and need special instructions.
We started by pulling the horseshoe and removed the bezel holding the radio / nav unit. Not difficult. We documented where everything was plugged into the existing radio. Important to do.
Note the existing unit is a double din, which the new PCCM+ is, so no need to modify the bezel to fit a double din unit. This also means the HVAC unit is in the lower portion of the center console, so no need to move it. If you have a single DIN radio and HVAC is in the upper section, your install / conversion just became more complicated. Also note the 4 disk CD holder unit is below the radio.
Next up is installing the new mic. There was an existing mic since his unit had the phone, but the existing mic doesn't work in the new PCCM. So the instrument cluster has to come out and the new mic fished across the cluster and out the radio cavity. Once again, not too difficult. The new mic fits in the existing housing unit.
It was at this point we started looking at what plugs we had and where they'd go in the new unit. Some were logical, some weren't. We had 2 plugs that we couldn't figure out but finally realized one was the old gps antenna and the other was the mic jack. Once again, the existing mic wouldn't work with the new unit. There is a conversion wire sold that would allow you to plug the old gps antenna into the new unit (only $46) but they don't tell you this, you have to find it on your own. We didn't want to wait for the interim wire to arrive, although it would have been a good investment when purchasing the PCCM, so we went with the supplied gps antenna (rolled up in a coil in the back).
Figuring out what went where was more difficult than need be. Not a lot of online documentation, but you could piece things together through various threads and vids. Maybe since there are so many variations it would be difficult to document, but much more difficult than it needed to be.
The new gps antenna needed to be double sided taped to the underside of the dash on top of the hvac duct. We also replaced the cd holder section with a cubbie hole and drilled a hole in the back of it to fish the aux box wire thru it. They weren't generous with cable length on this piece and it was the shortest 2 wires of the whole bunch. It took some judicious planning to figure out how to route this wire in order to have enough length to snap into the unit. We had to remove the subwoofer and console side panel to be able to get the cables fished out of the cubbie hole and up to the radio cavity.
After figuring out the wiring, we had to figure out how to hold the unit in place. Once again, various instructions but none seemed correct for our situation. Found a thread that said to put the mounting clips on behind the bezel and they would hold the bezel and radio solid. That worked.
Finally time to snap all the cables into the PCCM and then see if it worked with it sitting half in. Hooked the battery up and the unit came to life! We were able to find an FM station. Yay! One series of vids said to change a Volume setting from CAN to AMP, so we did. Things were going great until we discovered the radio stayed perm on when we shut down and took out the key AND the unit wouldn't light up with the headlights. Crap! We thought about it overnight and decided to set the option back to CAN (this is a Bose system) and that solved our problems.
We buttoned up the system and she looks factory original. My friend says the sound is miles better than the original radio.
One thing we ran across is if you have a 6 disk CD changer, it won't work with PCCM. They supply a loop of fiber cable but don't tell you it's to close off the CD changer system. They also supply a satelite radio cable but don't tell you that's what it's for. Other than that, plug and play.
