i have a mystery switch, i don't want to flip it because i don't know what it is too, it is under the radio, just a toggle switch. here is a picture.

 

After market switch someone added. Follow the wires to see where it goes.

 

Yeah definitely NOT factory.

 

From the Radio Shack factory perhaps...

DO follow the wires and check for poor connections, electrical tape coming off, bare wires, etc. Old electrical kludge jobs are often fires waiting to happen... (I was a victim a while back.)

 

 

Flip it, I dare ya.

 

I double-dog-dare ya, but only when you are doing 60 on the highway in the center lane surrounded by other cars!
Everyone should be gifted by a surprise like that...

 

It is from the Radio Shack Factory. It is hooked up to some kind of relay or something, I took it out, had three wires spliced one way and two another, they couldn't just use one long wire.....It went to some type of relay or something, shown in the picture, and looks like it was wired to the antenna, which is a power antenna at the back. Did they have power antennas? Also looks like there is one embedded into the windshield.. the other picture is of the hack job someone did before me, and I now have to get the dash piece in addition to an original radio.

 

WOW that is one SERIOUSLY blue interior.

 

Power mast antenna was optional, but not hacked up like that.

What I expect happened was the windshield antenna had very poor reception and someone elected to put a power mast antenna at the back. The factory would have put it on a front fender; I think B/C/E cars was on the driver fender in 1970.

The relay was installed so the antenna would run off constant 12V battery voltage when the relay got a signal from radio on-off switch to operate it, and so it would retract when you turned the ignition switch off.

Clean up the wiring and connections with proper splices and routing and keep your power antenna. I expect you'll need it to have any tunes in the car at all. 70 was the first year for the windshield antenna and its performance was marginal at best that year.

Those windshield antennas were terrible the first couple years. Poor reception, skritch noise every time the wipers passed over it, very susceptible to high voltage power line noise (real bad if you were driving down a road with a HV line running parallel to it). A lot of cars had mast antennas installed. Around 1973 they finally got the w/s antennas working reasonably well.

 

Ok, so the switch under radio must be to lower and raise antenna (doesn't do that though). The windshield appears to have been replaced (any way of telling for sure) I will clean up the wiring soon, going to pull out the radio that is in there and put in a factory one if I can find one. Also someone put speakers in under the dash on the right and left side, and hacked off the wires to the center front speakers. I am also in search of some other parts. Basically for the antenna I am not going to need it much, I will put my sirius in there when I am driving for radio. Thank you guys for the input.