The basics of satellite radio

General

My extended family and I have been spending a lot of time on the road lately. You see, last year my brother and his wife had baby Audrey and they live 350 miles down the road from the rest of the family. So there’s been a lot of backwards and forwarding between cities lately to get as much cheek time with little Audrey as possible.

The stretch of highway between here and there is peppered with a lot of trees, a lot of sky and intermittent radio stations that buzz in and out like sunflower seeking bees. When you do get good reception, there seems to be a lot of farm news, pizza joint openings and oddly jazzy funeral parlor ads. (Who knew local mortuaries were such big advertisers in small-town radio.)

So with lots of road time on my hands, I thought I’d try out satellite radio. Here’s the concept: Three geo-stationary satellites beam digital radio signals to the continent below. Repeaters (ground-based re-transmitters) ensure that most of North America gets decent coverage.

The content that rides these pristine digital signals includes 170 channels of specialty radio content that spans music, talk and sports, and is largely commercial free.

The hardware

To use the service, you need a digital tuner designed to receive XM signals that in turn can be connected to a set of speakers in your home, in your car or in – some cases – a portable speakers kit (baggy-pants teens call it a “boombox”).

The car is where XM got most of its initial traction and the highway between my house and Audrey’s house is where I primarily tested the XM service. To do this, XM sent me one of their new digital tuners, a handsome, black-faced device with an LCD display from Audiovox. It’s called the XpressR, and it’s about half the size of a DVD case.

Installation

While you can install the XpressR in your car yourself – as I did – this is not an ideal option. That’s because there are three wires to contend with. The device comes with a power adapter which slots into the cigarette lighter socket. The Mallomar-shaped antenna comes attached to a long cable that I snaked from the XpressR tuner down under the seat to the back window. The third cable can connect to the guts of your car stereo or you can swap it for an included cassette tape player adapter.

Neither of these worked for me so I used the XpressR’s built-in FM transmitter to broadcast the audio wirelessly to an unused FM radio channel that I tuned on my car radio. Not a great idea, either. FM transmitters produce notoriously low-quality audio. That defeats the purpose of the digital audio coming in from the satellite. Those last 24 inches ruin the experience.

A car stereo shop should install the XpressR. They know how to hide the wiring and ensure the audio is patched into your car stereo to you can enjoy the service’s full fidelity.

The XpressR unit ($129.99), however, is not a great gadget. On-screen controls are difficult to navigate. Channels appear as lists and as you choose each song or content queued to broadcast next, they appear on a split screen. To browse the menus, you click the tuner knob in one of four directions or turn it to scroll up and down lists like you would turn a volume knob. It’s not particularly intuitive so you tend to click when you should turn and turn when you should be clicking.

The display is bright and has high contrast for eyes that may not be as sharp as they used to be. Finding the right channel as you drive requires you to look at the screen and the knob to figure out what you’re doing. I swerved more than once because of the fiddling. There’s also a feature called “time-shifting” where you can rewind audio you want to hear again, like a comment on talk radio or the chorus of a song, if your spouse is nattering about the checkbook. This anti-natter memory feature can hold up to 30 minutes of audio.

The content

Tuners aside, if you’re fed up with FM and AM radio, you’ll love the XM content. The service features 170 channels of specialty audio that is mostly ad-free, although sponsorships pop up occasionally with messages like “brought to you by Lexus”.

My favorite channels are in the “Decades” category. These music channels feature tunes unique to each decade from the 40s through to the 90s. My 65-year-old dad (Audrey’s granddad) is a big fan of Buddy Holly so he likes the 50s channel. At 40, I’m a child of the 80s, so I listen to synthesizer rock and daydream about my 80s mullet hairdo. There are also channels dedicated to Christian, country, R&B and more. There are also five jazz channels.

If you’re into news radio, there are lots of those (12 channels) , including Fox, CNN and the BBC. The “Talk and Variety” category includes Old Time Radio, as well as America Right (XM calls this “Conservative Talk”) offset the adjacent channel by Air America Radio (XM calls this “Progressive Talk”). There’s even Open Road, a truckers’ channel for the big-rig set. There are also eight channels of sports. See the channel line-up in detail.

On one of my trips to see Audrey, I also discovered some great content for grandparents who occasionally have a backseat full of grandchildren. XM features two children’s channels: Disney Kids and XM Kids, the latter includes chronicles from Dora the Explorer, which, I have to say, intrigue me.

A subscription to XM costs $12.95 per month, though there are monthly discounts for long-term contracts. And if you have multiple tuners – say one in the car and one at home – there are discounts available there too. You can also tune in your subscription via the Internet.

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