DrFaulken suggested that there might be some interest in my take on Sirius. Being that I have been a subscriber for almost two years, I know a little about the service. I have a JVC KT-SR2000 Sirius receiver installed in my truck and occasionally listen to the service via the internets (which is available with Sirius for no additional charge). Given that a bad commute day for me is ten minutes, I probably don’t listen the service enough to justify the $13 a month subscription fee, but I like having it available both on the compies and especially for long trips.

Installation: Installation of the KT-SR2000 itself wasn’t too bad. In the interest of full disclosure, my father did most of the work (thanks dad!) but the only real work was running the cable from the antenna mounted above the passenger seat on the roof to the unit which we decided to have rest under the HVAC controls. The trick is getting the music from the Sirius receiver to the vehicles sound system. For the first year, I relied on the KT-SR2000’s built-in FM transmitter. In Williamsburg, that worked pretty good as there don’t seem to be many competing signals. In a more urban area, forget it. The FM signal from all of the radio stations is too much for the KT-SR2000’s puny FM transmitter to compete with. Since I wasn’t too keen in fiddling with my car stereo myself, I took it into Circuit City where they connected it into the sound system via my truck’s FM antenna thus bypassing any potential local station competition. If you are more into fiddling with car stereo stuff, I suspect this would be pretty easy to do. The only thing else I might want to do is more securely attach the unit to the truck. I think the most difficult part about the add-on satellite radio receivers is figuring out a place to solidly mount the things. Most vehicles don’t seem to have that kind of space.

Sirius vs. XM: Sirius Channel Guide and XM Channel Lineup I have only briefly listened to XM in LadyJaye’s Mazda, so I am far from an XM expert, but it seems like for the base music channels, XM and Sirius are pretty comparable. It seems like the main differences between the services are their sports coverage and talk offerings. XM has exclusive contracts with Major League Baseball, the PGA Tour the ACC, Pac-10, and the Big Ten and have a channel dedicated to the Big East while Sirius has contracts with the National Football League, National Basketball Association, National Hockey League and a variety of college sports (I suspect the games that XM doesn’t have exclusivity to). Sirius also has Howard Stern and Martha Stewart if you are into either of them and music channels dedicated to The Who, Elvis and Jimmy Buffet. I suspect XM has similar offerings, I just don’t know what they are. Besides coming back from the Gator Bowl last year, I haven’t ever listened to any of Sirius’s exclusive offerings and were I with XM, I suspect the same would be true. Still, its something to keep in mind.

Conclusions: Besides trips, I primarily use Sirius as my source for newer music. I have no patience for terrestrial radio any more. There are very few stations around these parts that play music I find tolerable and even those are filled with more commercials and talk then the ten songs they are willing to play it seems. While there is some talk from the DJs and some repetition, its localized to individual channels. Given there are so many different channels to listen to, if a song or DJ is annoying me, I have lots of other options. Its On Sirius is some how unaffiliated with Sirius but maintains a list of all the songs currently playing as well as what each station played for the past fourish hours which might be useful for getting a feel for stations. If you don’t share my unnatural fear of going up into your attic or live in a major metropolitan area where the Sirus signal is boosted, you can get a Sirius receiver connected to your home sound system following the folowing guide. Incidentally here is DrFaulken’s review of XM for comparison. Just keep in mind he actually can write flawless English sentences unlike myself.