I got my Father’s Day and Birthday Present yesterday. XM Radio is in my car now. How very fun. It sounds wonderful, and I’m finding more and more cool channels that I am going to enjoy.
Soundtracks is one that just blows me away. They play a movie, and you listen. Now, if you are facing 8-10 hours of driving in a day ( which I am going to live with soon ), that’s a nifty thing to get to do. I can check the listings on the Web, and see if there’s a flick I wanna listen to.
As a news junkie, the News Talk area is a gorgefest of information.
Any devotees out there? Drawbacks? Problems? High points?
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I’ve been thinking of getting either XM or Sirius, so that I can listen to The O’Franken Factor on Air America Radio without being in earshot of my computer. AirAmericaRadio is on stream 167 on XM.
As I’ve sorta mentioned in another thread, I just got XM myself. I haven’t gotten a lot of use out of it, as I haven’t done massive amounts of driving and I can’t get a clear view to the south to use the home adaptor. However, it seems pretty nice. I’m starting to wish I had saved myself a bit of money and gotten the Roady instead of the SkyFi, but with any luck the SkyFi will prove to have been the right choice after all.
I have some problems here at school while driving thanks to the geography, and I think I had it cut out on me a couple times on the way back from where I had it installed due to either geography or really heavy tree cover.
I’ve been an XM subscriber almost as long as they’ve been around (someone around here was even earlier).
I love it. When I recently traded in my Explorer for a minivan I actually went three whole weeks without it!!!. But then I arranged for a friendly man to dash-mount a Roadie for me and I’m back to my satellite ways.
I like Lucy, The Village, Radio Classics and others.
And never forget the advantages of having 24-7 access to BBC World Service.
Got my Roadie about 2 months ago, and while I only drive about 35 minutes to and from work each day, it’s still one of my favorite investments.
Presets:
Fred, Ethel, Lucy, all the Decades (but stays on Heidi Selexa mostly…rrrrrowr), Mix, BPM, The Move, The System, Comedy XM, The Rhyme, Bluegrass Junction, XM Classics, and the greatest of them all…Cinemagic.
Yeah I got the Roadie also, with the cigarette lighter/modulator up front. This way, if I hit a city that uses one FM station, I can shift easily to another.
We were somewhat early adopters - XM is currently installed in 1 car (other car has an XM radio, but we scavenged the antenna & reciever for the main vehicle) + SkyFi boombox.
I’ve noticed trees blocking the signal seems to be more of an issue this summer than previously; I wonder why?
I luurve my XM. I got it in October, however, and some of the perfectly unobstructed roads now give me breaks in transmission where the leaves came back in. It’s not a big problem, it’s just that it always happens when I really like a song. There’s a spot of the road on my way home and two buildings I drive past downtown that do it. And parking garages are my sworn enemy.
But on the whole, totally worth it if only because regular radio has gotten only more and more full of commercials and less and less full of good music that hasn’t been Clear Channeled.
I miss my radio being local, but whenever I switch to the local decent station it’s always in commercials anyway! I went back to Atlanta for a college reunion a few months ago and was all excited to hear 99x again, and it was great and their “we’re not Clear Channel” commercials were great except it seemed they never got to the “playing music” part of their job. Oops. Gimme my XM.
I can’t wait. I get to drive from the Hudson Valley of NY, across Penna. and up into NY state just barely on Monday. ( There is an alternate route, but either way we’re talking 450-500 miles of car time ).
OUT there. No radio signals, typically. Just static or marginal a.m. Now, I will have the full panoply to chose from.
I have noticed something kind of odd. As I drove down the NYS Thruway on Friday, the signal kept blanking out for a second or two. But, it happened a lot for a while and I was not underneath anything at all. Does that happen to people? Is it my unit or antenna? I mean, a song or two were ruined because of the incessant blankings.
That’s odd. Usually in the clear I get good solid reception. I usually only have problems with reinforced concrete structures like overpasses and parketing garages.
And even the overpasses don’t cause much more than a blip because of the buffering. Did you install yourself? Maybe the antenna line is loose.
Circuit City installed it, thought since it’s a Roady there isn’t much of an installation. I unplug and re-plug the antenna lead each time I park in NYC, I don’t want to lose a car window and a Roady box.
But, I’m fairly technoweenie savvy and I seat the plug in a centered and firm manner.
As I’ve posted in another thread, I’m a traffic reporter at XM. Thank you for your wonderful comments! It’s gratifying in the extreme that our hard work is paying off.
(unsolicited plug for myself) Catch me from 2 to 10 pm eastern at Philly 212 and San Francisco 221.
rec.music.dementia says you can get Dr. Demento recent/classic rebroadcasts at 9p ET (XM channel 6, Saturday night) and 12m ET (XM channel 40, Sunday night)
It’s not a big problem, it’s just that it always happens when I really like a song. There’s a spot of the road on my way home and two buildings I drive past downtown that do it. And parking garages are my sworn enemy.