My stereo has developed a weirdness. It acts like it's losing it's power, all station presets disappear. I have a portable MP3 player in the glove box hooked to the AUX inputs (plays through the CD selection on the unit), when this problem occurs the unit switches back to radio.

I had my son with me yesterday and had him watch the faceplate (I can't do that and drive). The power does not go off (I suspected a problem with my wiring), but the light stays on, it's just the digital letters/numbers goes away and comes back as if the power had been pulled.

Any thoughts?

There was a post similar to this a while back involving a different brand of radio but the solution may be the same. Turned out the radio has 2 different power leads, one to power the unit and a separate lead just to keep power to the clock and hold the station presets. Are you sure eveything that needs power is getting a steady current?

Here are links to the older post.
The first describes his problem, the second describes a different problem but if you read deeply enough it also mentions the solution to the first (the one similar to yours)

http://www.chevelles.com/forum/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=22;t=003313#000000

http://www.chevelles.com/forum/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=22;t=003411#000004

I'm going to be checking the power leads this weekend, that's my first suspect. It's interesting that the backlight stays on while the digital panel goes off...

Those were my threads. I tried to deny it for a long time but it did turn out that the "always on" power lead which ran the radio tuner and kept the presets in memory when the car was turned off was intermittantly bad. The cassette deck would play during the failures because that portion of the deck had proper voltage at all times.

I'd strongly suggest routing separate and confirmed good power leads to see if that solves your problem.

Names were witheld to protect the innocent! ;)

It's definetely one of the power leads. I had the same problem with my CA and found that one of my fuses was broken on one end making intermittent contact. I almost sent the unit back thinking it was internal. My symptoms were exactly as you described..Backlit but loss of tuning and presets...

I hate working on a problem, 'cause there's almost always something else wrong to go with it. I got under the dashboard last night to take a quick look for loose connections to the USA-2, and found a dangling vacuum line. Oh well, gives me an excuse to spend a few more minutes (what an optimist I am!!!) on the car this weekend...