I guess XM may have an advantage there. Sirius satellites are higher up, but they do move around in the sky.
Sirius also has the NBA and would have had the NHL, had they played any games this year :mad: . The NFL streams include announcers for both sides in each game, so you don’t have to listen to the Pittsburgh announcers when you’re a Browns fan during the Browns/Steelers game, for instance.
As for getting reception indoors, I can’t do that in the building I work in, but I work at a computer all day, so I can listen to music streams from the Sirius web site. At home, I have a boombox but find the reception is best when I put the antenna outside.
I think the one real advantage XM has over Sirius is that there is a wider range of equipment to choose from, and it is more elegantly designed. I ended up getting Sirius because the equipment was on sale and I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to have the car I was putting it in, thus saving $100 on that was a good thing (I ended up buying a new car about 18 months later and the existing radio wouldn’t fit in the new car, so I’m glad I didn’t spend more). Monthly service for Sirius costs a little more than XM, but you can pay for a year or two at a time and save a little that way.
Another reason I went with XM vs. Sirius was due to lessons learned in the question of VHS vs. Betamax.
I had a Betamax. Everyone knew it to be a superior technology to VHS. But VHS had a lot more users, and eventually Betamax died out.
Sometimes it doesn’t matter which is better today. It matters who will be around in five years.
I literally stumbled into XM. Took a road trip, the guy who went with me brought a Sirius. That was great, no looking for a station every few miles. When we got to our destination, a guy was trying to sell an XM for little of nothing. I had literally never been exposed to satellite radio, next thing you know I had one.
The Sirius he had used a FM modulator that your radio picks up, the XM I got has a cassette player interface. I liked the FM modulator better, less wires, but he says in cities with a crowded FM dial he gets cross talk from stations that transmit on the same frequency as the Sirius unit (you can change the frequency of the Sirius pretty easily if you have local station interference). Out here in the sticks, it wouldn’t matter, and I’m not sure if all Sirius units or all XM units are like ours. FWIW I just put the antenna on the dash and get great reception.
But I will say that living in the sticks the satellite radio is just great. And I have never even tuned to any of the talk radio or sports, I just wanted some tunes.
I got locked in for a year at $9.99/mo, but it went up a couple of dollars/mo April 2nd I think.
Fair enough on the sports. I don’t like pro basketball and I forgot about the NHL. Sirius does have the better lineup if you are interested in sports and talk radio. And I can see the attraction for having both streams–but I have to say I would listen to the Steelers PBP guys. That one guy is a hoot.
In either case, I really wish the companies would start streaming all their channels. Does anyone know why they don’t? My first thought was some sort of licensing or copyright restriction. Even though I wouldn’t get a Sirius receiver, I would probably pay for online access if they’d start streaming the NFL.
In some cities coverage is provided by land repeaters. The reception is comparable to FM broadcast. In cities without land based repeaters, you generally need to be able to put the antenna in a properly oriented window.
For the record, I have Sirius and love it. My daughter has XM and loves it. If I want to listen to techno I listen to her radio.
I have Sirius. I was unhappy because, while they had Headline News, they did not have CNN’s main feed. Recently, they changed that and I became very happy.
Now, there is no real difference for me. I only listen to five stations: Espn, Espnews, 80’s Music, 90’s Music, CNN, and occasionally E! (gotta love those True Hollywood Story Marathons…)
All of those channels are on both packages.
I got XM for Christmas, and I love it so far.
XM announced yesterday that they’re going to be the exclusive carrier for Air America starting in June, so if that’s a selling point, be aware of it. There should be a schedule shift to accomodate Randi Rhodes and Mike Malloy, too.
I love the baseball on XM, too. Yes, you only get home announcers (usually, although I haven’t heard a Marlins announce team yet) but the ESPN Sunday night game will be the ESPN feed.
XM has a deeper playlist, too. Sirius repeats songs often (based on what I heard as I was deciding.)
If you’re going to go with XM, let me recommend the SkyFi2 or the MyFi. The Roady2 is ok if you don’t plan to move it around, but I love my SkyFi2 and I want a MyFi.
That’s exactly right – those people who are receiving the feed indoors are mostly likely receiving the signal from a terrestrial repeater. Here, XM has an edge. They’ve got about 800 repeaters in 60 cities, whereas Sirius has about 140 repeaters (not sure how many cities). In each case the broadcast power of the repeaters is many times that of the satellites (and of course they’re closer), allowing indoor reception in many instances. A potential customer in a highly urbanized area who intends to use the system indoors a lot of the time would do well to inquire about the repeater situation in his/her city and perhaps to try out each unit at home.
Another nit. XM’s satellites are higher in orbit – Sirius’s satellies’ apogee of apx. 47,000 km is higher than XM’s geostationary orbits, but the apogee occurs south of the equator where the satellite isn’t even transmitting. Additionally, Sirius’ satellites are in an inclined orbit which travels well north of the equator, so the total distance from a user’s car to the satellite is even less than the difference in actual altitude of the birds. However, this should make little or no difference in reception, as the XM birds have nearly twice the broadcast power as the Sirius ones.
If you’re looking to use it at home and don’t live where you can catch a repeater, I suggest looking at your location and seeing what you roughly have to do to hit the satellite. The aiming for Sirius depends on where you live. Hitting a geosync satellite like one of XM’s can roughly be summarized as “aim towards Texas” (warning: PDF. Antenna aiming instructions for the Delphi Home Antenna are on page 4.)
But to put this in some perspective. I live in Harrisburg, PA and Sirius has a repeater here. We are not a large metropolis by any stretch.
But if you can check before buying that’s a good idea. If you find a good list of what cities are served by repeaters I would really appreciate a steer to the source.
Hmm, thanks for the news. Although I can’t confirm the “exclusive” part of that statement - the Air America home page links to this article, which says “What that means for Sirius Satellite Radio, which also carries Air America programming, is unclear at this time.”
It’s not a comparable situation. Those who chose Betamax ended up with not just an obsolete VCR, but also a shelf full of obsolete tapes. With satellite radio, switching from Sirius to XM (or vice versa) is just a matter of buying a new receiver.
Yes, there are licensing restrictions on providing online streams for content that is also commercially available via other means like free radio stations and TV. I don’t know that that will ever be resolved.
I was looking at my latest Crutchfield catalog and I see that now there are in-dash receivers that are compatible with both XM and Sirius, which is sweet. I didn’t look much at the portable stuff, but I wouldn’t be surprised if sooner or later those come in both flavors too.
Yep, according to the catalog, XM just raised their price to $12.95/month, which is the same as Sirius, but they also added some more streams. I think the competition between the two is really going to heat up over the next couple years.
The portable unit I have uses the FM modulator technique and if I go through Greensboro I have to change the frequency it’s set on since there is an NPR station there that uses the same frequency. This is the one thing I really dislike about this unit - it’s too hard to change the setting on it while driving, and sometimes the reception just isn’t as clear as I’d like (I had an in-dash system before this so I got spoiled that way too). I need to find out if the radio I’ve got in the car has an aux output I can use instead, but so far I’ve been too lazy to find that out.
Do you have a cassette player? I was unsatisfied with the FM mudulator so I got a cheap generic cassette adapter and plugged it into the AUX output of the satellite radio. Works just fine.
Yeah, the original article didn’t make it clear, but a later article I read (link is evading me ATM) said that June 11, Sirius would be losing their AAR feed.
No - the car is new so it has a CD player instead. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a CD player adapter, but it might be worth a look …
That’s a strike against XM, for sure, but probably not enough to make the difference.
I can’t imagine how it would work. I think it’s safe to say that if you have a CD player and no tape deck, you’ll have to use an FM transmitter.
Unless his head unit has an AUX input, in which case there’s probably an adapter that will provide a wired connection.
I’m going to take this opportunity to say that the folks at XM411 and Sirius Backstage have been very helpful in answering my questions, and I would recommend that anyone with questions seek their advice.
Yeah, I forgot about that. Most (if not all) AUX inputs are a simple 1/8" stereo plug. If you could hook a cassette adapter to the unit, you could use the AUX. All you need is a short length of male-male cable.