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bubbagump
01-08-2006, 03:12 PM
I cut and pasted this from a brief review I wrote in the Sirius forums:

I bought a Sirius Sporster with a six month subscription. Set-up required the installation of an external antenna with extension. The best I could get indoors was 3 bars with occasional flashes to seven. Much of the time the signal dropped to a point that no reception was possible. With an external, I'm getting a consistent 10 bars. Setting this up was far from painless. Fish tape, several trips in and out of the attic and drilling. About three hours total. You could get away with a less time consuming and more ghetto installation however. Now that everything's connected, the only problem I have with the hardware is the amount of heat generated by the Sportster. It may be a non-issue long term but anything that generates this much heat relative to it's size may have reliability issues. You can fry an egg on the friggin thing. I've gone through a number of the channels and found nothing particularly compelling. The sound quality of Sirius content is AWFUL. Very similar to Audible content at the 1 or 2. In mp3 terms, probably 12 kbps or below. By comparison, AM radio sounds much better. FM sounds like SACD by comparison. Shoutcast content is HiFi by comparison. No lie. Regardless, I bought the unit for one reason - Howard Stern. As long as the content from Howard's channel's is funny, compelling, and hopefully not too dark, I'll hang in there. Without Howard, there is no reason to suffer the quality of this service.