I went and bought a Sirius radio a few weeks ago. At the time I bought it, Brenda treated it the same way she treated the Tivo, somewhere along the lines of “you’re spending how much on this thing?”.
The following day, we took a trip to New Jersey to see relatives and see my niece’s baptism. Long trip from Boston to central NJ, and the Sirius radio was a champ the entire way. Julie was in the back sleep and I tuned it to the kids channel, which balanced Barney with Animaniacs and even some Schoolhouse Rock. Once she was sleep on her car seat, I was able to change the channel to BackSpin (classic Rap) or the 80s channel.
So here’s the deal with this thing. You buy the receiver ($79 for the Starmate) and wire it into your car. The receiver attaches itself to your windshield, an antenna runs out to your roof and is held there with a pretty string magnet. Power comes from the cigarette adapter. The reciever then picks up the signal and rebroadcasts it over FM to the channel of your choice. I gotta say, the FM rebroadcaster is far better than my Griffin iTrip and my Neuros – no static, volume is great.
There’s 120-or-so channels you can choose from that vary in genre from random batshit right wing talk radio to about every genre of music to traffic and weather for most big cities. Toss in some channels for kids, two comedy channels (one family friendly, one not so much), and various sports channels.
Reception is pretty good everywhere. Today was nice and cloudy and I was still getting a pretty strong signal. In the city, there’s a terrestrial broadcaster so there’s still a good signal when there’s tall buildings around. There’s a few areas in my neighborhood that has a lot of trees where the signal cuts out every now and then. Stopping under a bridge isn’t good either.