*NOW* you tell me not to play ABBA or Bee Gees! (Both of which I have listened to successfully without any ill effects - at least to the truck!) Yeah, I'm 36, so I lived through the 80s, and the tail end of the disco era. Nearly anything can be heard emanating from my speakers - ELO, Rammstein, Indigo Girls, Linkin Park, Barry Manilow, Larry Gatlin, DMX. So my truck would be more likely to suffer an identity crisis than most. LOL

When I put my Sony deck in (which has successfully been through 3 previous cars, 2 major collisions, one of which the rear of the deck was exposed to weather for 4 months due to a twisted firewall) I was replacing a crappy aftermarket that was connected to the OEM harness, although to my extreme annoyance, the factory plug was cut off. I'm not sure if the ground that fed the busted deck came from the dimmer harness, I wouldn't be surprised because some people don't check that at all, thinking a black wire must obviously be ground. I just used what the other deck was using without actually checking into it, took the lazy way out!

I've seen many a botched install in Chrysler cars because people remove the actual ground strap from the radio and tap into a random black wire instead.

I'll get back into the main ground harness and check on them, and in the meantime, I'll run a dedicated ground to the deck. If my deck is grounding partially through the antenna, this will clear up radio reception a little. I've already cleaned up the manifold ground and gave the connection points for the negative cable a good scraping when I changed it. But I haven't checked the tranny ground.

Good call about the increased draw with the brake lights and all that. You're absolutely right about that, and I recognized the added draw as the actual issue. I know the juice has fewer actual paths through the vehicle than, say, the 80s and 90s GM vehicles I've owned - and so any voltage drop becomes even more crucial, because it involves more equipment due to less physical wires being used.

I was mainly concerned if the flickering lights were normal for the trucks, since every car has its own specific glitches and ghosts. I suppose if I really want to cut down on the amount of current draw, I could switch to LEDs, and even changing the bulbs throughout the cluster would make an improvement to overall demand on the system. I've already considered that option (since I plan on pulling the cluster to install a tach anyway) but I've been hesitant to pull the trigger on it due to color choice and brightness. I honestly don't know what will be bright enough and easy enough to read, and not sure if I want to keep the factory green or not.