Sticking To The Earth

Last weekend I finally made the leap to satellite radio and ended up landing with something of a thud. The whole experience has been a disappointment.

First of all, both XM and Sirius offer plans at $12.95 a month, and I actually had decided to go with XM only because they're based here in DC. But then upon closer inspection I started finding differences in their online services.

If you want to listen to XM through your computer, the service is an additional $4.99 for subscribers (or $7.99 for non-radio customers). That's not too bad, but here's the kicker: They will sign you out after two hours for inactivity if you don't periodically click onto the player and bring it into the foreground. That really irritated me.

Sirius, on the other hand, offers online listening to its subscribers at no additional charge. And--more importantly--they don't sign you out. That actually tipped the scales for me, so that's why I bought a Sirius receiver. But after activating it, I couldn't access the online player any more! For some reason it kept trying log me into the now expired three day trial player. An exchange of several emails with their support people proved fruitless. The morons would end up answering questions I didn't ask, or giving me solutions to problems I wasn't experiencing. At one point they even changed my username for some reason.

I'm guessing their customer support people are in freakin' India and can't read English. I suppose moving such operations overseas saves payroll, but what good does that do if you end up pissing off your customers?

But the most disappointing aspect of satellite radio is the reception itself. And the ugly truth is that reception is an integral part of listening to radio.

While its surprisingly great in downtown DC, working in even some long tunnels, that's only because they use terrestrial 'repeaters' in urban areas. Once you get about 20 miles outside of town, it quickly goes downhill.

All kinds of obstructions can interfere with the signal, the most common being highway overpasses and trees.

With the overpasses, the break in the signal actually occurs a few seconds after you're back in the open. This delay is presumably because the radios have a buffer built in which is specifically supposed to prevent such interruptions. I had heard this buffer was ten seconds long, which would prevent most such breaks in coverage. Turns out that's a crock. It's barely two seconds, if that. I would guess that well over half the overpasses I encountered (outside the range of the repeaters) caused problems, and these occurred even at 65 mph.

The other issue, surprisingly, is trees. And since a sizable portion of my driving is on rural two lane roads lined with evil trees, this is quite annoying. Worst of all, it doesn't even have to be a heavily wooded area with a 'canopy' of leaves over head. Just having a few trees close together on one side of the road can pose problems if they happen to be between you and the satellite. Guess maybe I should be more careful about mapping out my routes.

On the other hand, all those damn trees are enough to make me rethink my opposition to Bush's environmental policies.

So is satellite radio worth it? Well, I suppose if you do a lot of cross-country interstate highway travel, then the answer is yes, provided you're willing to put up with the occasional overpass induced interruption. It does prevent having to hunt for a new station every hour or so.

But at 13 bucks a month, it's not for me. Call me cheap, but for that kind of money I expect much more consistent service.