I have no luck with electrics.

Took new Heep to auto electric shop to have a new key programmed in. DRB has comms to PCM but not BCM or SKIM.

Am not a happy camper. Sitting in waiting room waiting to find out if the guy has time to troubleshoot today. Was planning on starting to strip the good stuff off the old one later

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the cherokees do not have a BCM. what year is it? does it have an alarm?

Thought the skim was done thru the pcm?

Have you confirmed your XJ has SKIM ? Is the technician too recent out of Tech School to notice you have an XJ, and not a ZJ, thus the lack of any BCM ?

The SKIM system has a chip reader device in the steering column, and the PCM is married to the SKIM reader and chip in the key by its programming. Any PCM can have the SKIM programming enabled using a DRB-III programmer.

he seemed like he knew what he was doing and is an ex-XJ owner. He was running a DRB emulator on a laptop. He said he'd probed one of the comms wires and found a short to ground where he expected voltage. He couldn't troubleshoot today but left me printouts of the wiring so if I have free time (HAH) I may take a stab at it. Didn't have a meter on me and I was 40 miles from home, but close to my buddy's shop where my old red POS is currently residing, so I went over there and started stripping it... got my Optima, cleaned up the battery tray, swapped steering wheels (the one in the "new" one was bent and shitty) and installed cruise while I was at it, got my good stereo and two speakers out of the red thing so I can install that some evening next week and fix the power windows, speaker wiring etc.

XJ definitely has SKIM, has a grey key and the security light. Also, the key he made me will NOT start the vehicle. Don't know about the BCM, that was an option on his emulator, but there is definitely no comms to SKIM.