Me and My Roady

I'd been of two minds on satellite radio for awhile. Mind One told me that being able to listen to everything from an all-soul station to CSPAN in the car sounded mighty appealing. But Mind Two reminded me that I'm already paying for satellite TV, broadband, a cell phone, and Netflix--and so the last thing I needed was another monthly bill for entertainment.

I mulled it over for a few months, doing some research (XM vs. Sirius, for instance), and skulking around in the car audio section of Best Buy. Ultimately, Mind One won (it almost always does). I recently bought and installed Delphi's Roady, an install-it-yourself XM Radio receiver. And I'm glad I did. Roady, which sells for around $120, consists of a small box (a tad larger than a deck of cards) that you mount somewhere within easy reach of the driver's seat, a little magnetic antenna that you fasten to the outside of your car, and a cable that connects them. (This cable is thin enough that I strung it through my trunk and tucked it into crevices inside the car, rendering it almost invisible.)

Roady draws its power from the cigarette lighter, and it comes with an adapter that uses a car's cassette player to let it pump its audio into the vehicle's audio system. My car doesn't have a cassette deck, so I had to spring for the $30 wireless adapter, a tiny radio transmitter that sends the XM signal to a preset station on your radio. (Both the cassette adapter and the wireless transmitter are kind of kludgy--if you ask me, every car radio should come with a jack that would let you make these connections via cable.)

Setting up Roady took about ten minutes--I mounted it below my climate controls. It doesn't quite look like it was always there, but it blends in surprisingly well.

Once I'd activated service with XM--$10 a month for 121 stations--I was up and running. The first thing I heard was the Hollywood Argyles' "Alley Oop"--a song I hadn't heard on a broadcast radio station in maybe fifteen years. It seemed like a good omen.

I don't think any one customer is going to be interested in all 121 stations; for me, it was the oldies stations and the news ones that appealed. The service has stations that specialize in music from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, a soul station, and audio feeds from CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, CSPAN, and more.

The music is certainly an upgrade from the local stations I tended to listen to--the channels are ad-free, and there's less happy talk and a more eclectic selection of songs. And the news stations feel like an embarassment of riches, especially in interesting times like these. (Before XM, I listened to a local NPR affiliate that replayed the same news shows over and over and over again.)

What's not to like? XM brags about its crystal-clear sound quality, and it's a little less than that with my setup; I'm guessing it's because local stations are competing with the wireless transmitter's signal, but I could be wrong. And as much as I like the specialty music stations, a little voice in the back of my head (Mind Three?) keeps telling me that a really good radio station would mix it up with an unpredictable barrage of music from multiple decades and genres.

But for now, Roady is a very engaging traveling companion. When I got a ReplayTV box a few years ago, I practically stopped watching to live TV. So far, XM is having a similar effect; I've listened to maybe three hours of broadcast radio in the car since I installed the Roady.