XM
For the new commute, I hooked up XM Radio in my car. My deck already supported it, and all I had to do was type in the radio ID (which is built into the deck) into the XM web site, pay, and in a few hours, I started receiving all the channels. (How the hell does that work, anyway? There is no uplink, obviously, so does the signal coming down from their satellites have a record of all valid radio ID’s?)
Anyway, maybe the service will grow on me, but after a day of playing with it, my initial reaction is that it’s not that great. Their main selling point is that XM has over 150 channels. That’s great, but how many of those are completely useless to me? Take a look at the listing. Am I ever going to listen to Nashville!, The Village (folk music), or Bluegrass Junction? The answer is hell no. There could be people out there that would listen to these, but I’m sure such people wouldn’t listen to the stations I would listen to. The point is that there is no way anyone, regardless of musical preference, would listen to more than 5 or so stations, so the whole “150 channels” turns out to be meaningless. (20 of the channels are just weather and traffic informations for specific cities across the U.S. that I don’t live in. At most, any subscriber would listen to one of these stations, so maybe they should change their wording to “XM Radio has 130, possibly 131 stations!”)
The reception is good, I guess, but I did have some outtages when I drove under an overpass. I’m told that having the antenna mounted on the outside of the car helps with this. I think mine is mounted right on the dash.
I’m going to stick with it for a while to see if it’s worth it. The commute is going to be long and boring, so anything will help. I hope some of the talk and comedy stations I haven’t listened to yet are of some value.