Originally Posted By: KenK
Originally Posted By: DeathtoToasters
No cell service, Onstar was broken at the time, when I finally got the onstar working...


Was the service down, or was the Onstar unit in your car not functioning and you somehow got it to function? How did you fix your Onstar at night on a mountain road?

My understanding was that Onstar communicates to the base stations via the cellular connection, and uses that cellular connection to transmit GPS coordinates and other information received from the vehicle. If there was no cell service, how did you contact Onstar?


Ok here is the long short story as to how the Onstar was broken and how I fixed it.

Almost a week before this incident, I was getting gas in our Yukon Denali at a Chevron station with an overhang over the pumps.

Well the keys fell out of my pocket and my fat ***, I mean, butt, hit the lock on the remote keyfob OR my hand hit the lock door button while I was getting out of the car, so when the door finally closed, it was locked. I cannot figure out which it was that locked the doors. Now if the keys were in the ignition, then the doors would have never locked, but like a good little boy, I took the keys out.

Now for anyone with kids you may sympathize with this, I left the car remote started because my 2 year old was in the car, it was almost 95 degrees. So I left it on with the remote start for the A/C and also the movie he was watching.

Well doors locked, truck on, keys on the front seat = BAD SITUATION.

I knew I had 15 min of the remote start left. So he was safe for 15 min. I called Onstar to have them remote unlock the car, but they could not as the antenna was not getting a good signal from the awning at the gas station. What a mess, so the Onstar rep asked if I could push the truck out from under the awning. Do I even need to say what I was thinking.

Anyway I had an idea. I only had about 4 feet until I had clear sky. The front of the truck was in the sunshine. So I told the Onstar rep to wait a sec. I got on the running boards and pulled the Onstar antenna off the roof, hoping there was enough slack in the wire to go that long.....nope there was not. So I ended up ripping the antenna off the roof completely and pulling the plug that connects under the roof out.

Anyway fire/rescue came and slim jimmied the door, which is another story. End result we got into the car.

Well I put the broken Onstar Antenna into the glove box.

Now fast forward till that night stuck in the mountains.
After we realized our cell phones would not work. I had to figure out another way to get help.

I was sitting there, listening to the kids crying, my wife crying and was just beating myself up for getting us into that situation.
The most lonley and helpless feeling in the world is not knowing that you are stuck. It is when my wife looked at me as quitely said:

"What are we going to do?"

and I said:

"I don't know"

Seeing that look in her eyes was the most motivating thing in the world.

I have always said that I can sleep on a park bench if I had to, but no my wife and kids.

So like a light shining on me I grabbed the Onstar antenna out of the glove box, then I had to figure out a way to get to the other end of the connection which was in between the head liner and the roof. So I did what I needed to do. I ripped the upper center console out of the roof (which housed all the buttons for the rear door, sun roof etc) then pulled the head liner down above my head, stuck my hand in there and found the other end.

Well I looked at the antenna end, and noticed that 2 of the three plug wires were pulled out, so I twisted them back together and pushed them back into the connector. I then opened the sunroof, replugged in the antenna and pressed the little blue button on the rear view mirror. It took about 4 -5 tries to actually get the wires pushed in enough to work, but they finally did.

THAT is how I fixed it.

Like I said, long-short version.


Edited by DeathtoToasters (06/26/07 02:06 AM)
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