I want to pit either SiriusXM or myself, but for now, I’m going to try to set my anger and frustration aside and look for constructive advice from the Dope.
I just bought a new car a little over a week ago, and one of the items I purchased was the installation of SiriusXM (the system that came with the car was already satellite-ready, so it was just a kit that needed to be installed). I already had satellite in my other car in an aftermarket system, so I was just planning on duplicating the plan I already had. Yesterday, the dealership was finally ready to do the installation, and they got it done in a couple of hours – great! So I immediately call up SiriusXM and have them add the new radio to my existing account, which they do. They give me the exact same package (which was the All Access plan) as I had on my other radio. And off I go.
So last night, I’m driving home and go to tune in to a baseball game on satellite. Except, mysteriously, the baseball channels are all missing. Why can’t I find any baseball? Then, slowly, it dawns on me. Two years ago, when I bought my first satellite radio, I remembered seeing that even though Sirius and XM merged years ago, you could only get the MLB package with an XM radio. But none of that occurred to me before I went through this purchase, since in my head, I was only duplicating what I’d done with my first satellite radio. Turns out that Mazdas only come with Sirius, and not XM.
So now what do I do? Satellite radio is nice enough, but the primary reason for having it in our household is for the MLB package, and this car is now our primary vehicle. I’m still on a free trial, so I’m not losing money on the subscription, but I can’t really recover the costs on the installation. I don’t want to replace the car’s head unit because (at least as I understand it) an aftermarket system won’t integrate with the steering wheel controls I have currently, nor am I excited about the idea of spending money on an expensive new head unit and installation after having just thrown money away on this install. And it’s also not clear to me that an aftermarket system would play nicely with the apparently very sensitive Bose audio system that came installed with the car, making me think I’d perhaps have to change out ALL of the audio components rather than just the head unit, all to get a different satellite radio.
Off the top of my head, it seems to me that the least expensive and most reasonable thing to do is to get a portable XM radio to be plugged into the auxiliary jack. But I’m still in the middle of being miffed and am probably not thinking straight. So I’m open to suggestions.