Satellite Radio Is Officially Here

dragons_flight writes: "XM Satellite Radio has officially launched, initially selling equipment only in the Dallas and San Diego markets, but going national by Nov. 15. A reciever for home or car costs ~$300 plus a $10/month subscription service. Many new cars will be pre-equipped with satellite-ready radios. XM provides 100 digital channels, a signicant number of which are commercial free. Sirius satellite radio says they are committed to launching be the end of the year." Any readers out there with the equipment for this have comments about it? ($10x12 + $300 makes $420 I'll be putting toward other things.)

Comments

Orbits

[mangu]

...probably wouldn't work well in cars, and i'd always be getting interference from cloud cover and such...

The Sirius radio satellites will transmit directly to cars. They are in a specially designed orbit, with three regularly spaced satellites in an inclined orbit, which takes them very low over South America and high over North America. That way, there's always one satellite nearly overhead and moving slowly over the USA. Their control station is in Ecuador, where all three satellites are visible at all times. Unles you are in a tunnel, there should be no interference anywhere in the 48 contiguous US.

Why it's no good for me (& many others)

[maggard]

I commute almost weekly between work in Boston, Mass. USA & home in Montreal, Quebec Canada. It's about a 6-hour drive through mountains and with a very limited choice of stations, both FM and AM. As someone with a strong dislike of both religious programming and country music and with limited endurance for Delilah (an impossible-to-escape syndicated program) I'd be very interested in radio programming that I could receive uninterrupted en route.

My first choice would be for a live NPR feed though PRI and of course CBC would be welcome. All-music would be useful as an alternate though I'm really looking for something to keep me engaged on the long and at this hundredth-time boring night drive. Mp3's or other pre-recorded music aren't what I'm looking for (I already have a large collection of CD's & tapes) and so aren't interesting as an alternative. I could download some news & interview programming I like and burn it to a CD before each trip but this would be far more preparation then I care to do so regularly.

Unfortunately it appears that "satellite radio" will be as problematic for me as conventional radio. Driving through the mountains at ~45 North will likely result in service interruptions (doubtless the same as with conventional radio: always at the most interesting points.) Without much likelihood of repeaters in these rural areas this appears an inherent bug in the service and one which (at least for me) brings it from a strong possibility to something I'm not willing to pay much extra for.

A couple of tangential thoughts:

1. As Canada's CRTC takes no action to prevent piracy of US FCC-licensed satellite television broadcasts (aside from refusing to allow the services to be directly sold in Canada) I wonder if the same will hold true of radio broadcasts?
2. Is anyone aware of an online service where I could plug in a route (not a single location) and get a listing of stations by genre along the way? I imagine this would be a popular add-on to the many online route/map services but none seem to have anything like this. What I'd like to see would be something like a listing of public radio station by frequency along my route; others would presumably prefer country stations, pop or rock programming, etc.

Finally, Howstuffworks has a much more complete explanation of the history of this technology and how it really works (the corporate web sites are careful not to identify problems such as the need for repeaters.)