Kenwood and Boats don’t mix?

Have you opened up the unit to take a look at the board?

i dont mean to sound like i'm beating a dead horse but you said the battery measured 12.7 volts. is that underload? here's what i'm getting at. measuring battery voltage underload will tell you that the battery is good. so now you need to measure voltage at the harness and prove that it see's voltage. now connect the harness to the radio and attempt to turn it on and measure for voltage again. if you read 12.7 volts on your dmm your radio does not have a short but has a problem, perhaps a bad connection. if you measure significantly less than 12.7 volts again your radio is a dud. Prove your connections, use a meter!

I promise, I'll behave!

I opened it up to see if I saw anything obvious but ended up not going much further than 5 screws deep. That's a very good point about the battery and measuring the voltage. I'll be sure to do that tomorrow and I'll keep ya'll updated.

In a moment of shear impulse (and thanks to a very good associate discount) I bought a brand new Clarion Marine HU and just installed it...works PERFECTLY! One thing I did notice, the first time I hooked it up directly to the battery to make sure there was no voltage issue and it turned on fine. Once installed, there was a 10A inline fuse that I had put in when I installed the Kenwood and a 15A inline fuse that came on the lead from the wiring included with the Clarion. The 10A fuse (a slow blow even) blew immediately, so I got rid of it altogether and it's working great, no blown 15A fuses or anything. So this all leads me to conclude that battery voltage, bad connections, etc. were not to blame. It was the Kenwood the whole time. Oh well, the Clarion sounds even better. Thanks for all of your help!!