Hi all,

We have recently had the roof resprayed on our smax and asked for the black fin to be painted aswel to match the colour of the roof. The garage took it off to spray it and now the sat nav is not working. Could this be because it's been painted do you think? Or has something happened to it when it's been off? Have tried calibrating it but no signal at all. Any advice would be appreciated 😊

It's possible, but I doubt it's due to the paint.

It's more likely they had ether forgotten to plug the Fakra connector back or hadn't hooked it up properly.

Yea we've tried that and still not working. 😐

GPS signals are weak.

While paint may attenuate signal reception to a certain extent, especially metallic paint, there shouldn't be significant loss in reception unless the paint had been put on too thick, or multi-coated. Many OE shark fins are colour matched with no issues. I spraypainted mine on my own with OE touch-up spraypaint - again, no issue.

As illogical as it may seem, I'd first do a battery reset - it's a procedure known to reset quite a few unexplained electrical glitches, but do it only if you have your HU code available.

Moving on, what you might be able to do is remove the sharkfin and turn it upside-down or to its side, reconnect the FAKRA if there is sufficient slack in the cable and see if there is any improvement. If there is, then the paint could possibly be the culprit.

If you have a spare generic GPS antenna, try connecting it up temporarily to the FAKRA to see if there is improvement - if not, you may have to investigate upstream of the FAKRA.