Antenna works? How?
Still tries to go up and down? Or still brings in a radio signal??

I am going to assume he means still receives signal, meaning that he unplugged the motor power wire under the fender. There is no place in the fender to disconnect the antenna coax cable.

And just an FYI to others, I just rewired my motor and installed a new OEM mast. I had to rotate the teeth towards the front of the truck for the motor to catch hold. The FSM I read said towards the windshield, so try both.

Correct. I unplugged the motor, antenna is still plugged into the radio.

Nope

there is literally a power to antenna wire that goes out to the motor and is what makes the thing go up when you are on radio...and down when you go aux/cd etc...least mine does.

I installed an internal amp'd antenna on the windshield behind my rearview mirror and capped off the OEM one on the fender, because I too am sick to death of the thing never functioning.

Amp'd one needs power, I simply swapped the power to antenna wire that went to motor over to my amp'd antenna. Very easy install.

Has a LED to verify power, which lights only when I'm on radio. Singal is comparable or better than OEM provided its grounded well ;)

Reviving a dead thread here, I know...

On the '99 4Runner I just purchased, the previous owner disconnected the antennae mast from the motor (the antennae was always in the up position and I never once heard any noise from the motor). The mast was kind of bent so I took a hammer and *gently" tapped it all the way down. I turned on the radio and received good quality signals from all local radio stations.

This is okay, right?

I'm pretty sure you just voided your warranty!

Not really. It's your truck, do what you want, not having the antenna up won't "hurt" anything, other than your ability to pick up some radio stations.

Forgot to thank you for that. I did that but eventually just did the Tacoma manual antenna replacement. Cheers

So there really is no fuse you can just remove for the antenna motor???

I'm also curious. I don't even notice the antenna noise anymore but my one friend always gives me a hard time about how I've owned the vehicle for over 3 years and still not unplugged the broken antenna.

The circuit actually takes from three fuses: ACC, DOME, and ECU-IG. Any one will disable the antenna (DOME will probably leave it extended), but each will disable a slew of other things. So NO, there isn't.

http://tacoma.site40.net/4Runner_96-...emci/051aa.pdf

This has changed since the origin of this thread five years ago. Suddenly one day all still remaining T4Rs received a separate antenna fuse out of the clear blue sky. Nobody knows for sure when it happened, but your fusebox does have a new slot in it just for the antenna that it didn't have in 2010.

This worked perfectly, the buzzing and grinding is gone. Thanks for posting this solution.

My antenna still works. What I'm gonna do is put a dash switch spliced into the antenna wire from the radio. That will freeze the antenna in whatever position it is in. That way it won't go up and down every time I turn the car on. I can leave it up indefinitely until I go off road and want to protect it, then I'll just turn the switch on, turn off the radio, and it will go down, then stay down when I turn the switch off. I am hoping that the antenna in the rear side window will still give me a decent signal even with the front antenna down.

Will this work? Or will I kill any signal I get from the power antenna by putting in this switch?

It will work fine. I used my ECT switch which I had no use for after the 5speed swap. There is an extra blank by the emergency brake you can use if you can find another ECT switch

I unplugged the relay harness and matched up all 8 wires with the one on the pdf posted earlier. It looks like there are two going to the antenna motor. I presume one is for raise and one is for lower.

Someone mentioned before how that harness does more than just the antenna so I don't want to leave it unplugged. What I did is turned the radio off and just as the antenna was halfway I unplugged it. Now the antenna is frozen half way up so it won't hit the garage door anymore. But if the antenna is fully down I don't get a.m. reception. What I'll do is cut each of those two wires and put them through a double switch. Then all you have to do if you want to change the position of the antenna is turn the switch on, then turn the radio on or off and right when the antenna is in the position you want, you just flip the switch and it freezes it there until you turn the switch back on.