Questions and Answers

Mysterious Black Box Q. No life or death problem here but rather a question of sanity. I own a 1989 Toyota Camry DX with the All-Trac feature. It is a new car to me and I recently installed a new stereo and speaker system.

In the process of putting my dash back together after installing the stereo I dropped a screw and looked under the passenger side seat for it. Low and behold I saw a little black box covered with heat sink fins across the top. It was locked down to a mounted bracket on the floorboard and I thought I was a really lucky guy that had bought a car with an amp that someone forgot to take out.

A couple of days later I went back to take a closer look and found that it wasn't anything close to an amp. It has 4 wires going to it (I assume for power), some kind of a black coax cable, and most confusing is the RJ45 plugging directly into it. ( I don't know your background in communications or that of anyone else who might read this so for the sake of being complete an RJ45 jack looks like a telephone jack except that it uses up to 4 pair and is a little bigger than your standard phone jack. It is commonly used in computer networks as a connection for cables between the server and client machines.)

By the looks of it I believe that it came factory installed because of the mount and that the cables, wires, and ect. are all routed very nicely under the carpeting up towards the center console from what I can tell. Also I removed it from the locking mount and completely checked it for any kind of label or mark but unfortunately there was no such.

I have tried to find some kind of info on it in my owners manual, on the Toyota web site, and searching the internet with my favorite search engine. The best thing I could find was these ask and answer help articles you have done.

Please help me figure out what this mystery box does before I go completely bananas.

Thanks,
Dave

A. To the best of my knowledge Toyota never used RJ45 connectors in any kind of automotive application, I'm not sure if RJ45 was even used back in 1989. The easiest solution I can think of is ask the previous owner what the heck it is. Barring that, the best I can do is an educated guess.

I'd be curious too, I'd trace the coax and CAT-5 back into the console to see where it winds up. It's possible it may have been some type of early mobile phone set up or a mobile computer set up the owner had installed. In either case the wiring would have to be neatly installed away from the car's computers like you describe to eliminate interference.

I've enclosed a photo of an old computer network card that approximates what you describe. On the bottom is a BNC connector for coax cable, it's also possible the coax was built in to the card and on the top is the RJ45. I'm betting it's for a computer, I'd be interested in hearing the outcome.

Additional Information provided courtesy of ALLDATA

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