You might want to have your unit checked out. Maybe the antenna isn't properly connected?

I rarely have dropouts and in the places I do, my XM car drops out there as well...

 

Very few drop outs for me. Can u compare to someones aftermarket system in your area. Have u spoken to folks at a Best Buy or Circuit City or other sales location. See if u can get them to let u test an after market system with external antenna to get a comparison.

I have three systems with only the 6er an OEM. All perform so closely as to not able to tell the difference. Only at home under heavy cover of Oaks do I have drop outs.

 

That would definately be a frustrating experience. My wife and I both have Sirius in our cars and have been extremely happy with the service. We are located in Indianapolis. I never experience any drops because of trees and only experience very brief drops when passing under wide overpasses.

All that said, I did rent a car last year that had XM Satellite. I drive back and forth to Chicago quite frequently. The XM was dropping so often that I just turned the XM off. My Sirius is absolutely fine on the same route.

I wonder if the coverages differ by region between Sirius and XM?

 

Take a look at the Satellite coverage maps in post #25. Satellite radio, just like satellite TV, is a Line of Sight (LOS) system. Any off angle starts to degrade signal, any obstructions, including heavy weather, attenuate the signal often to the point of a drop out. Looking at the map, some folks would have lower elevation angles to the satellites compared to others. Generally lower elevation angles cause more things to become obstructions and more directional impact. Higher elevation is better.

Being both a both a Sat Radio and Sat TV (including foreign satellite) home user I see all kinds of situations. They tend to be similar, but the basic satellites are 120 degrees apart (TV & Radio) so there are times TV is good and radio is not during Florida thunderstorms and vice versa.

 

Yes, get Sirius, it's a great service. Just promise to try and listen to a few other things in addition to your mind numbing hip-hop. Try some real music, like classical instruments or 80's rock

With Love
Mistress BMW

 

interested in the setup.. can anyone post pics of the reciever... and for those in so cal.... how much is the unit and is it possible to transfer the reciever to another car??? i do have sat prep... whatever that means... any info would help thanks eric d

 

There is nothing visual about satellite radio to take pics of. Just a display on the idrive screen. So cal is probably fine but I am dropping my Sirius after my first free year because of terrible reception - dealer says that it is fine - but I drop out with trees, overpasses, and in some places for no reasons at all.

I almost never listen to my satellite anymore because of these issues.

 

There is nothing visual about satellite radio to take pics of. Just a display on the idrive screen. So cal is probably fine but I am dropping my Sirius after my first free year because of terrible reception - dealer says that it is fine - but I drop out with trees, overpasses, and in some places for no reasons at all.

I almost never listen to my satellite anymore because of these issues.
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Have u ever compared with another user of Sirius in your area? Could be u have real problem with antenna/connection. Or r u in heavily wooded areas all the time. It is a LOS system afterall, just like Sat TV. That is unless ur in one of the large cities that use repeaters due to such tall buildings. Still LOS but from other angles, not the satellite. But they do need to improve the "skip" tolerance to tens of seconds so it could be useable going through short tunnels, large overpasses and light trees, I agree.

 

I agree with cobradav that they should increase the buffer to allow more tolerance to dropped signals. As long as they can receive data faster than the stream uses it up to play the audio, I don't know why they don't build in a significant size buffer to prevent the dropouts...

 

Not sure how feasable it would be... I'd imagine there is some FEC built in already to the transmission to deal with bit errors and the like. I haven't really checked to see if XM or Sirius publish such information, but for comparison DBS uses just 23Mbps for actual audio and video out of the available 40Mbps. The remaining 17Mbps is used for Forward Error Correction (FEC).

They're already super bandwidth constrained - I'd imagine sending fast enough to gain a handful of seconds to deal with complete signal drop isn't in the budget.