FAQ
General
- Where do Cantaloupe Radio products ship from?
- Where are your products designed/manufactured?
- Do you repair radios?
MDeck Bluetooth Retrofit Kits
BA-2
Where do Cantaloupe Radio products ship from?
We ship all of our products from our main office in Brooklyn, New York.
Where are your products designed/manufactured?
We design all of our products in Brooklyn and manufacture them using reputable manufacturers in China.
Do you repair radios?
We no longer offer repairs or service to customer radios. Soon, we will be able to point visitors to our 3rd-party partner for repairs and refurbish work. Stay tuned for that to come.
What does MDeck mean?
MDeck is short for "emulator deck", owing to the fact that our MDeck products emulate the original cassette deck's form and function but provide a very different set of features.
How do I determine if the BA-2 will fit my radio?
The BA-2 kit fits the BMW CM5905, CM5907, and CM5908 radios. All 3 of these radios shipped from the factory with a sticker on the bottom with this model number bold at top. However, the stickers often fall off over the years. The best way to identify your radio is by visually comparing it to the pictures below. In short, if your radio doesn't look like one below, it isn't compatible.
CM5905/CM5907: These two radios look almost exactly identical. Below is a picture of a CM5907. The only difference between this and the CM5905 is that the button labeled "BAND" on the CM5907 is labeled "AM/FM" on the CM5905. Note the 2 horizontal tone sliders on the right side and the 2x5 grid of push buttons in the center.
CM5908: The distinctive feature of this radio is the infra-red slider in the lower right corner used to adjust tone and sound positioning. Also note the top row of 6 buttons, bottom row of 2 buttons, plus the 4-way pad to the left.
Does the BA-2 kit work in other BMW radios?
The BA-2 ONLY fits the BMW CM5905, CM5907, and CM5908 radios. It does NOT fit similar-era BMW radios such as the Pioneer KE-81 and KE-83 ZBM, earlier radios like the CM5804, or later radios like the CM5903L, C33, C43, etc.
The reason for the limited compatibility is that our kit is designed to replace the internal cassette mechanism inside the radio. Different radios use different cassette mechanisms with different physical footprints and different electrical connectors and signaling. This is not a generic kit. It just so happens that the cassette mechanism used in the 3 radios the BA-2 supports are similar enough that we were able to design one board to fit all 3.
Do you plan to make a similar kit for the BMW KE-81 or KE-83 ZBM?
At this time, a kit for these Pioneer-manufactured radios is not on our roadmap. These radios are relatively less popular than the Alpine-manufactured units the BA-2 supports, and swapping from these to the CM5905 or CM5907 is a simple plug-n-play swap.
Is there a way to add this kit but also keep the cassette deck?
Unfortunately, no. The kit was designed from the start to sit in place of the cassette deck, there's no way to have both. Why? We spend a lot of time at the start of design figuring out the best approach for adding Bluetooth. Obviously we need a way to feed audio into the radio, and maximal control through the factory interface is a huge plus. But it also needs to be DIY-installable (no soldering or electrical knowledge required) in as little time as possible, and we want the solution to look elegant. Since there's no spare real estate inside these radios, replacing a factory component is pretty much required. Given that and our design criteria, a cassette deck replacement is really the only (and actually, a very good) solution. We understand there is the niche customer who doesn't want to give up their cassette-playing-abilities. We don't have it out for cassettes or anything, it's just the solution that makes the most sense.