Getting Sirius - Week 1
I bought a Sirius radio this week. I picked up the Sportster, a cool looking unit with 40 minutes of record time and an included car adapter. The 40 minutes of record time isn’t really good for recording programming but it’s great in a TiVo pause live radio kind of way. I got lucky. The unit I bought was the last one in the store. My radio listening is primarily a home activity so I bought a home adapter too.
I'm trying to take a critical look at this because the equipment isn't cheap. My set-up is about $150 after a rebate plus $13/month for the actual service. The store has a 30-day, full refund return policy so I’ve got some time to make a decision.
The Sportster is pretty slick. It isn’t too big, isn’t too small. The indiglo screen is large enough that you can read it from across the room. There’s a little IR remote control to help keep me sedentary at home. Surprisingly, the remote is also very convenient in the car. Reaching across the dash to handle the many buttons is difficult to do while driving but just using the little remote is pretty simple. I don’t have all of the channel numbers memorized (there are more than 100) so I have to judge based on what I hear. I’ll get to the content in a minute. First, I have to get the thing up and running.
Finding a satellite signal proved harder to do than I expected. Rain clouds and neighborhood trees posed a problem but it was the windows in the house that caused the biggest interference. It’s a good thing the Sportster is made to be helpful. It comes with a tool that displays the signal strength of the satellite and terrestrial repeater. The indoor/outdoor antenna gets no satellite signal and 30 percent repeater with the windows in my home office closed. Open the windows and satellite signal jumps to 50 percent while the radio reception more than triples to 100 percent. So out the window it went.
Online activation took about two minutes. Once I was on the air, it was time to test the range of the Sportster’s FM transmitter. I set the broadcast to the empty 87.9 slot on my FM dial and went on an indoor walkabout. The signal comes in loud and clear on the old-fashioned radios in my bedroom and kitchen. The signal to the clubhouse is still a work in progress but bedroom and kitchen are an excellent start.
So what is there to listen to? The obvious first stop is channel 100, Howard Stern’s station. His show is the reason I chose Sirius over XM. There are lots of music channels to choose from plus sports, news and a raft of public radio networks. It’s virtually the same thing offered by XM with a few differences, the most notable being Stern.
Howard Stern’s two channels (100 and 101) are all Stern, all the time. I have to say, I was under whelmed with the first week. Yes, it’s just week one but I was hoping for something more than his show, a replay of his show, 18 hours of program analyzing that day’s show and something like six hours of Bubba the Love Sponge.
I was most disappointed with Howard 100 News. I expected that to be a fun take on current events. Instead, it’s a bunch of former news people doing stories about, you guessed it, what happened on that day’s show.
I also heard them say that Howard and Co. will be moving to a 4-day work week with a fill in or behind the scenes show on Friday mornings. On this, I call Bullshit. At least Letterman tapes two shows on Thursday so he has something new for Friday.
There are some sun breaks in the clouds though. The Coming Soon programs sound interesting, particularly Tissue Time with Heidi Cortez: Where America Comes Together and Lesbian Dial a Date. They’re also developing a Sirius tech show. I’m not sure how this will work. It’s not very useful to have a show about hooking up your Sirius radio when those that need it can’t hear you.
The other Sirius channels are interesting but I'm not exactly sure what they offer that I don't already get locally. I have the music formats I want. The NPR stations in town are excellent. The sports station is good. The news stations are good. And with Podcasts and the internet radio, I get just about everything I think Sirius offers but for the low, low price of free.
We’ll see if my opinion changes in a week.
Later,
Mike
P.S. I’ve proved one theory right. Anderson Cooper sucks just as much when you can only hear him.
I'm trying to take a critical look at this because the equipment isn't cheap. My set-up is about $150 after a rebate plus $13/month for the actual service. The store has a 30-day, full refund return policy so I’ve got some time to make a decision.
The Sportster is pretty slick. It isn’t too big, isn’t too small. The indiglo screen is large enough that you can read it from across the room. There’s a little IR remote control to help keep me sedentary at home. Surprisingly, the remote is also very convenient in the car. Reaching across the dash to handle the many buttons is difficult to do while driving but just using the little remote is pretty simple. I don’t have all of the channel numbers memorized (there are more than 100) so I have to judge based on what I hear. I’ll get to the content in a minute. First, I have to get the thing up and running.
Finding a satellite signal proved harder to do than I expected. Rain clouds and neighborhood trees posed a problem but it was the windows in the house that caused the biggest interference. It’s a good thing the Sportster is made to be helpful. It comes with a tool that displays the signal strength of the satellite and terrestrial repeater. The indoor/outdoor antenna gets no satellite signal and 30 percent repeater with the windows in my home office closed. Open the windows and satellite signal jumps to 50 percent while the radio reception more than triples to 100 percent. So out the window it went.
Online activation took about two minutes. Once I was on the air, it was time to test the range of the Sportster’s FM transmitter. I set the broadcast to the empty 87.9 slot on my FM dial and went on an indoor walkabout. The signal comes in loud and clear on the old-fashioned radios in my bedroom and kitchen. The signal to the clubhouse is still a work in progress but bedroom and kitchen are an excellent start.
So what is there to listen to? The obvious first stop is channel 100, Howard Stern’s station. His show is the reason I chose Sirius over XM. There are lots of music channels to choose from plus sports, news and a raft of public radio networks. It’s virtually the same thing offered by XM with a few differences, the most notable being Stern.
Howard Stern’s two channels (100 and 101) are all Stern, all the time. I have to say, I was under whelmed with the first week. Yes, it’s just week one but I was hoping for something more than his show, a replay of his show, 18 hours of program analyzing that day’s show and something like six hours of Bubba the Love Sponge.
I was most disappointed with Howard 100 News. I expected that to be a fun take on current events. Instead, it’s a bunch of former news people doing stories about, you guessed it, what happened on that day’s show.
I also heard them say that Howard and Co. will be moving to a 4-day work week with a fill in or behind the scenes show on Friday mornings. On this, I call Bullshit. At least Letterman tapes two shows on Thursday so he has something new for Friday.
There are some sun breaks in the clouds though. The Coming Soon programs sound interesting, particularly Tissue Time with Heidi Cortez: Where America Comes Together and Lesbian Dial a Date. They’re also developing a Sirius tech show. I’m not sure how this will work. It’s not very useful to have a show about hooking up your Sirius radio when those that need it can’t hear you.
The other Sirius channels are interesting but I'm not exactly sure what they offer that I don't already get locally. I have the music formats I want. The NPR stations in town are excellent. The sports station is good. The news stations are good. And with Podcasts and the internet radio, I get just about everything I think Sirius offers but for the low, low price of free.
We’ll see if my opinion changes in a week.
Later,
Mike
P.S. I’ve proved one theory right. Anderson Cooper sucks just as much when you can only hear him.
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