Aside from the fact that I *hate* terrestrial radio and it's 30 minutes of commercials every hour, I wanted to be ready for when Howard Stern makes his move to satellite. Also, comedian Jim Breuer (from SNL...he did the Joe Pesci show) has a show on Sirius, and it's fucking hilarious. Oh yeah, and there are 60 channels of commercial-free tunes and another 60 channels of everything under the sun.
I picked up one of those small ~$100 recievers, the kind that can be used with either a home kit, car kit, or stuck in a boombox. It's about the size of small Walkman:
There's a small antenna (a bit bigger than a small cellular flip phone) that you have to point towards a satellite, but fortunately we apparently have a terrestrial repeater around here....I just stuck it in the window on my front porch, and got 100% signal strength from the repeater:
Activation is pretty slick. You set up your radio, tune it to a specific channel, and create your account on their website. Every radio comes with a unique ID code, which you enter while signing up. Once complete, their system sends a signal to your radio via the satellite, and it comes alive.
One neat feature these radios have is a song alert. If you hear a tune you like, you just hit a button on the radio, and it remembers it. The next time the song is played on ANY station, it alerts you to the fact. You can also see what's playing on all of the other stations while still listening to one specific station. The radio we bought also has an FM transmitter built-in, so you can tune in Sirius on any FM radio in the house. The transmitter is fully programmable...you can set it to any frequency on the FM dial.
And as a Sirius subscriber, I can login to their website and listen to any of the music channels....they stream them all over the 'Net.
Overall, this thing fucking rocks. At $11.87/month (when you pick the 1-year plan), it's worth every penny.
