Mods, I couldn’t decide what forum to put this in. It’s not a poll, and there’s no single factual answer to my queries. Hence, I decided against IMHO or GQ. I apologize if I guessed wrong.
Howard Stern’s announcement yesterday of his move to satellite radio reminded me that I wanted to look into getting satellite radio in my car. We get DISH satellite TV at home and one great aspect of it is that we can get numerous channels of music of high-quality content, better than anything I can get on FM/AM radio. And commercial-free, of course.
Does anyone here receive satellite radio in their car? How happy are you with it? As I mentioned above, I love the great content of satellite TV music, but will satellite radio provide the same quality? I know there are two or three satellite radio companies out there - is one better than the others, IYO? Any data at all will help me in my decision. Thanks for any help.
I don’t own this myself, but we had it in a rental car for a trip to vegas we recently took. It was awesome for those wide open desert spaces where normally you probably couldnt get any regular radio reception.
There definitely are a LOT of channels, both music and talk radio. I enjoyed the comedy channels, standup from all over the place 24 hours a day. The sound quality was fine, and we had no reception problems except going through tunnels, etc, which you would expect.
If you purchase this for your car I would recommend getting the stereo that allows you to take the receiver inside the house as well. That way you get more radio time for the money.
To sum up, if I could afford the equipment, this would be in my car and home RIGHT NOW.
I have Sirius. It works very well in my car. It’s not so good inside a building - I tried it both in my apartment and office (both 1st floor), and even with the antenna on a south-facing window ledge, the coverage is unreliable.
Music selection is pretty good, but I’ve never used satellite TV music so I can’t compare it to that. There’s a wide selection of talk and news channels, but these are not commercial free. (The music channels are all commercial free.)
My reason for choosing Sirius over XM are:
[ul]
[li]Sirius has two liberal talk radio channels, Air America and Sirius Left. Sirius Left is their original content and some of the programs are very entertaining. XM only has one liberal talk channel that combines various syndicated shows (some from Air America). [/li]XM doesn’t carry NPR at all. Sirius has two NPR channels. Unfortunately Sirius doesn’t carry the two most popular programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, (I guess NPR doesn’t want Sirius to take away business from local stations) but NPR has many other fine programs. [/ul]
I can’t give enough praise to my XM radio.
I’ve had it since it was introduced and have never regreted it.
My car deck has 3 sets of presets with 6 stations each. I have preset them to my 6 favorite music stations, my 6 favorite news and sports stations, and my 6 favorite talk and comedy stations.
Since having for the past 4 years I never ever listen to local radio. In fact I moved from Florida to Minneapolis 2 years ago and I don’t even know what the local radio stations are since I don’t listen to them.
Driving cross country my wife always wants to take my car since it has the XM. The drive from Florida was great being able to listen to a talk program for hours on end without ever losing a signal.
It has also furthered my tastes in music. Because the radio displays the title and artist of the song being played I keep a pen and paper in the car so if I hear something I like I can write it down and pick up the CD. My appreciation for jazz, blues, sinatra/dean martin has really gone up.
Drawbacks??? Well, if I’m listening to something really good and I get home and pull into my garage, I lose the signal.
Check out both the XMradio and the Sirius websites.
If you commute more than 30 minutes to work, you need to have this. Every morning I can get caught up with news on CNN, FoxNews, or BBC.
If I may ask, what did Sirius set you back, scr4? I assume that, like satellite TV, you may choose the amount of “channels” you wish to receive, and this will affect the price.
No, you get all 120+ channels for $12.95 per month. I think my Audiovox receiver with car kit cost about $130, plus about $60 for the home kit (which, as I said, doesn’t work all that well in my locations).
My receiver came with an FM transmitter so there is no wiring required. Unfortunately I found the sound quality to be poor, possibly because we have radio stations that broadcast in the same frequencies. I now use a cassette adapter (the same kind used to hook up a portable CD player to a cassette-only car stereo) and that works much better.
I agree. My receiver has a MEMO button so if I hear something I like, I can just hit that button and it’ll record the title and artist name. And I don’t even need to buy the CD because the receiver has the “S-Seek” feature; I can keep a list of up to 20 (?) songs I like, and it alerts me whenever one of these songs is playing on any channel.
I’m looking into it now. Sirius is $12.99 a month for all channels. There is some talk whether Howard Stern will be on a premium channel when he gets there in 15 months. XM is $9.99 a month and an extra $1.99 for the premium channel that has Opie and Anthony. They may be adding more people to the channel but it just started this week. The Playboy channel is also extra. Prices for equipment vary greatly add it depends on what you want, home or car use.
This is what I have now - Sirius with the Audiovox tuner and the FM modulator, and if you want the portable receiver, there are potentially 3 ways to hook it up to your speakers. The FM modulator route is really the worst in terms of sound quality so if you can go with the cassette adapter like scr4, do so. I don’t have a cassette player so the only other alternative for me would be to use a patch cable for a direct connection an auxiliary input. Some car stereos have these and some don’t, though. It will, however, provide you with the best quality sound if you can do it.
In my previous car I had an in-dash system, which I loved, but I couldn’t put it in the new car as the stereo in the new car is completely different. There is an aftermarket in-dash satellite stereo available for my vehicle, but it was a special order ($$$) so I went with the portable instead. Besides wishing I had better sound quality, I can’t say I like having the cable stretching from the tuner to the cigarette lighter all the time. It’s ugly and gets in the way of the CD player slot, and if I had the cassette adapter that would add more to the mess as well. You’ll also want to take a look at your car and see where you can mount the tuner - some cars really don’t have a good place for that, which may make you decide to go for an in-dash system. Sirius equipment tends to cost a little less than XM, but the monthly subscription fee is a little more (you can get a discount if you pay for a year or more at a time, rather than monthly).
I also have the Sirius boom box, and reception indoors on that is iffy. Outside it’s great, though, and the antenna cable on it is very long, so sometimes when I want to listen inside, I just put the antenna outside through the door or window and that works very well! I also find in the car that when I am driving past tall stands of trees, they can interfere for a second or two until you pass by.
As for the content, it’s terrific. The only people who couldn’t find something they want to listen to would be people who hate everything. There’s just about any kind of music you can think of, comedy, talk, news, entertainment and sports.
While I would like to reconfigure my satellite equipment, I would never want to go back to crappy old commercial radio again - I got my new satellite equipment installed four days after I bought my new car because I couldn’t stand not having it!
This problem gets worse, the farther north you go, since the satellites your antenna has to be able to “see” are closer to the horizon. I’ve found, with XM, that in VA, it never cuts out (other than in tunnels), but in northern CT and southern MA, driving past a steep-ish hill to the south causes the signal to drop out until I’m past the hill. That still beats the “no FM at all” in those areas, of course.
One other thing you might want to take into consideration is that Sirius streams their music channels (but only their music channels, unfortunately) over the Internet. This, of course, is not all that useful unless you have broadband, but it would be something worth thinking about.
I have XM and the Delphi SkyFi receiver for both my car and my dorm room. I went with XM because I liked the user interface of the Delphi better than what was available for Sirius. However, I paid a lot more getting the SkyFi than I would have getting either the Delphi Roady or the Sirius-compatible hardware that I’ve seen.
Sirius should be better in this respect. XM uses satellites in geostationary orbit which are always on the equatorial plane. Sirius uses satellites in inclined orbits so at least one of them is north of the equator at any given time.
I’d be surprised if this is really what’s causing the problem. A geocentric orbit is 42,000 km out, and the radius of the earth is only about 6,400 km. With the relatively small difference in latitude between VA and MA, that hill’s gotta be pretty darn steep and close for the angle to make a difference in reception.
XM uses repeaters in the more densely populated areas.
My XM is an complete and unmitigated good in my life. Simply going through music channels without that annoying terrestrial advertising is worth the $10 per month right there.
Get it. Get it now.
I actually have two. One in my car and a boombox for around the house.
I have XM Radio, and I love it. The music is insanely great. For me, it’s worth it just for the opera and the folk music stations alone.
I chose XM Radio over Sirius based on their respective responsiveness to me as a potential customer. I sent e-mails to both XM and Sirius asking why I should choose one over the other. XM answered me back the same day. Sirius took over two weeks for a response. Hello, XM Radio!
All I can report is what I’ve observed, and it’s very consistent. Pass along a steep, big hill just to the south of the road, and the signal is lost until you’re past the hill. It’s consistent enough that I can predict when it’s going to happen as I’m driving down the road.
There was a time when I could have worked out the trigonometry of the situation, but that was 35 years ago, so someone else will have to run the numbers!
Take a good look at the TV satellite dishes on people’s homes in northerly areas. By the time you get to the higher latitudes, they appear to be pointed almost horizontally. In places like Iceland and Fairbanks, if you don’t have a line of sight almost down to the southern horizon, you can’t use a satellite dish. In Fairbanks, I believe, the azimuth (correct term?) is only 7 degrees for the TV satellites.
A geosynchronous satellite is on the equatorial plane, and can be approximated as being at infinite distance. So if you were on the equator, and at the same longitude as the satellite, the satellite is directly overhead. If you move 10 degrees north, the direction of your zenith moves by 10 degrees, so the satellite moves down by 10 degrees. If you move from VA to MA, the satellite gets about 5 degrees lower.
As I mentioned earlier, that’s only for XM satellites. Sirius satellites are higher up in the sky.
Could that be because Sirius was busy with their higher amount of subscribers and working with their system and XM has a lot of free time on its hands?
