1996 Nissan Maxima cd deck constant 12v

I'm installing a Pioneer Premier DEH-P670MP cd deck on my friend's 1996 Nissan Maxima, which had an OEM tape deck, non-Bose system from the factory (his step-dad bought it new, so nothing has ever been changed).  I used the  wiring information from this site and things seemed to go pretty well with the exception of a few inaccuracies.

I have all four speakers connected correctly (tested with a double-A battery to confirm the wiring).  My main issue is the constant 12volt power source, but the antenna control is also an issue.  The [url=https://www.the12volt.com/installbay/detail.asp?info=alarm&year=1995-97&make=Nissan&model=Maxima&ID=18545&type=Stereo]wiring diagram from this site[/url] notes a pink/blue wire color for constant 12v power and a blue/black wire color for the switched 12v power...the wire colors are without stripes, just pink and blue.  When we turn the ignition (for the sake of argument, we tried: accessories; on; engine turned on), no power is sent to the deck, and Pioneer decks will automatically turn on to the demo mode on initial installation.  We tried many different combinations while doing trial-and-error problem solving.

There are some "extra" wires tied back, which I assume would be for an OEM cd player.  Those wires are appropriately colored, so we tried those as well with no success.  After about an hour, I decided to connect both the constant & switched wires (from the deck) to the OEM switched power wire on the car.  This [b]worked[/b] when turning the ignition to accessories, on, and turning the engine on (again, for the sake of argument, we did try all 3).  This worked with both the solid blue wire to which the old tape deck was connected, as well as the extra, tied-back blue/black wire that were not in use (the ones probably for OEM cd deck).

We then tried all possible combinations with the tape deck's wiring of pink (constant) & blue (switched) and the "extra wiring's" pink/blue (constant) & blue/black (switched).  Nothing would work unless both the aftermarket's yellow (constant) and red (switched) wires were connected to a switched power wire...to confirm all possibilities, I tried one aftermarket wire (yellow and red) on each OEM wire (blue and blue/black) and this worked; both were seperately connected to a switched power supply.

After knowing this, and seeing that the wiring diagram didn't fully apply to our wires, we tried attaching the yellow (constant) wire to the other wires that weren't speaker leads.  We tried dimmer, illumination and antenna control all without any success.

SO, the issue here is there is no apparent constant power supply, but when the tape deck was installed, the presets were never lost, so there's a constant power [i]somwhere[/i].  The wiring to the deck is not bad, because this is proven true when connecting the yellow wire to the OEM switched wire.  Just because I'm anal about things, I checked (after each connection attempt) to confirm that the deck's built-in fuse was not fried.

Does anybody have any experience with this issue, or have any suggestions?  I'd rather not tap into an existing constant connection or run my own wire except as a last resort, because there is obviously a constant somewhere in there since his presets on the tape deck were never lost unless the battery was disconnected.

While typing up this post, I got the idea (would've been better last night) to use a volt/ohm meter to test for current on all of the wires to find a constant, so I'm going to do that.  Is there anything I should be aware of...such as "there is [i]another[/i] constant wire, but that isn't the TRUE constant wire...if you use that one, ______ will get fried/blown/broken/messed up/insert-other-bad-occurrence-here"?  Heh, this is the weirdest and most frustrating problem I've ever encountered when installing any home/car audio hardware and it's really bothering me that it's not an easy fix.

If you have no suggestions, I do appreciate your time you took at least reading this post.  Thanks!  I'll try and stick around to offer a helping hand with other members, as well as offer some personal experience with problems and solutions I've had.

Do you have a tester?

I just tested for voltage on all the non-speaker wires and got nothing.  I tested for voltage on the factory clock's wires and got nothing.

If I runmy own wire from the battery/elsewhere, do I need to place any type of resistor inline, or just treat it like an amplifier and put an additional fuse inline?  The deck has a 10amp fuse, so I guess I'd put a 10 or 12 amp fuse in, right?

Oh no...I was hoping I would post before someone tried to suggest something.  I'm SO embarrassed.  I called up this guy I've dealt with before at Circuit City and told him exactly what I did and he suggested checking the fuse since there was NO current on the constant wire.  Sure enough, a 7.5amp fuse was blown.

SO, thank you all for reading my lengthy post about something so trivial as a fuse :/

I'll stick around and help out others where I can :)

Yeah, I was going crazy because I used a volt meter and had no power coming from that...so I figured as a last resort before running a new wire, I would splice into a different wire like the hazards or the clock.  I checked those and they were all dead too!  Yeah, that was an easy solution, and I cannot believe I didn't think to check the fuse...a few hours wasted testing and searching online.  I thought it was  Nissan thing since the antenna plug needed an adapter, I was hoping I wasn't being dumb, but sure enough there was a fuse fried ;)