You should probably still put a switch in series with the ignition wire since it is intended to be a switched power input, but for testing purposes you can just connect it straight to your battery wire with no switch. So to summarize, for testing you should have the yellow and red wire from the amp connected to the positive battery cable and the black wire from the amp connected to the negative battery cable. Then you should be able to push the power button on the remote and turn the amp on. If it doesn't work with this setup, the only other troubleshooting step I can think of is to check voltage on the amp side of the fuse to make sure it's not blown. Short of that, you may have a defective amp.