Bad tech leads to happy tech
Jan. 2nd, 2003 12:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tugrikOne of the things that ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
revar and I got into early on was XM Satellite Radio. Niether of us could stand our local stations most of the time, and even with monstrous MP3 collections it's nice to have someone/something expose you to new music now and then. There's a lot of things to like about it: nationwide coverage, little or no commercials, tons of genres of music, displayed artist/title information, higher quality sound. The disads were few, but notable: $10/mo subscription. Expensive hardware. Mobile only (in-car). This balances out more to the advantage side, so we both got one. I became quickly addicted to a few channels: 80s on 8, Cinemagic, Audio Visions, and four varieties of Bad Techno channels from 81 to 84. Much with the thumpa-thumpa-trance.
I ended up picking up a Pioneer XM module with the FM modulator and installing it in my GL1800 motorcycle. It fit exactly into the slot where the crappy and overpriced Hondaline CD player would go, and integrated well with the radio. The controls were too small to work easily with the gloves on, but it worked well enough. The sound was great, but things in the motorcycle headsets had to compete with the wind anyways. I wanted to install one in the van or at home if possible so I could get my Bad Techno more often than when I was riding the 'wing. I just couldn't justify spending another $10 a month (as the subscription price is per radio not per person). This problem decided to solve itself this past week in an annoying but affective way.
The short of it is that I didn't waterseal the grommets into the radio-space of the GL1800's trunk properly. Riding in the rain caused water to wick up under the trunk assembly and follow the cables to the radio itself. It took a few days for the electronics inside to corrode. Luckily for me, my GMRS radio is a waterproof handheld so it survived nicely. The XM display first started to flicker now and then. Eventually it just refused to turn on. Greeeeat. Well, time to replace it if I want to keep the tunes.
Luckily technology marches on. The 2nd generation of XM players has been released, and the best of them so far was the Delphi SKYFi unit. My integration side loves this dang thing, 'cause it's all so modular.
One buys the main unit by itself for about $120 (less than half the cost of the now-dead Pioneer unit). The box is about the size of two decks of cards side by side, and contains the user interface and XM codec. You get a remote control and a manual with it -- nothing else. It makes no sound on its own, and is rather useless in this state. To get sound out of it, you need to buy 'application cradles'. There are currently three of them: A car one, a home-stereo one, and a boombox one.
The car stereo one is about $60, and mounts to the dash. One wires it into the car's power, sets the antenna (included with the cradle) on the roof, and hooks up the audio (either direct to an aux jack, via casette adaptor or using an additonal-cost FM modulator). Then just plunk the main unit into the cradle. The home one is the same price and comes with a bigger indoor antenna, a wall-wart, and RCA outs to hook into the home stereo. The home one works through the roof decently well, and the antenna is waterproof with a 25ft cable, so you can mount it outside if you need to. I bought one of each: one for the van and the living room. After the rainy season is over I'll get kits for the two bikes.
The nifty one, though, is the new 'boombox' option:
This provides power via either a wall wart (included) or 10 D-cell batteries. It has the same antenna as the home kit with an internal wind-up storage area for the cabling and a mount on the back. When the antenna is clipped to the box it looks like part of the unit, nicely self-contained. The radio clicks into the front. I've got it sitting on my desk at work right now, playing some 80's tunes. With both a south-facing window and a nearby terrestrial repeater the signal strengths on both antennas (XM antennas are dual satellte/terrestrial units) are at full power. If i'd had trouble I could have run the antenna out against the window, but no need. The box gets more than loud enough but it's no super-quality jam-crate. It's got a headphone jack and works well with the etymotic earphones.
This little box made my day, XM-radio-wise. I still only pay for one subscription (I transferred from the dead box to the live one; they do that for free) but now I get tunes in all my vehicles, my home, and my office. Other units are supposedly on the way, such as a fat-walkman style one with the antenna on the headset band and a 'standalone cradle' that has an FM retransmitter that one only needs to set within a few feet of any radio. Since it's made by Delphi (GM auto electronics), the cradle for this unit will start getting made into OEM harnesses on new cars. The display shows more data in a much nicer UI than any other model and it's the cheapest model out there.
Some of my friends have expressed worry about XM 'going away'. It looks like they should be sticking around a bit. Their competition (Sirius) is dying, doing the bankruptcy thing right now. I feel bad about that, since it was 9-11 that pretty much hosed them -- their main offices were in the twin towers, and the destruction set back their funding and public release hugely, which lead to most of their problems and XM's dominance. While sad for competition, it's good for us XM folk: some of their exclusive agreements (like NPR) may now get to defect over and thus improve XM's service. XM's also made-or-beat subscriber estimates for the last two terms now, and there's hope they'll be way ahead on the next one. This little Delphi unit is being mass-marketed at the usual outlets and the on-net hype (such as fan-groups and hardware hackers) is getting a good head of steam. The company running XM also announced they have enough investment cash to last through "cash flow breakeven". I'm hoping this all adds up to there being a service for my radio hardware to listen to for a long time to come.
I also hope satellite radio gives the local radio stations a good kick in the teeth. Most of the bay-area radio stations suck, following mass-market formulas. If something good and original pops its head up, one of the bigger stations or nationwide congloms comes and buys it up and crushes its soul into some cookie-cutter clone station. I know that XM has some Great Evils as investors (like Clear Channel), but the advantage it has is it's big enough to allow obscure genres to exist... and it gives me the option to pay a small fee so that I don't have to listen to 25 minutes of ads per hour of programming. About 1/3rd of the channels have no ads at all. Most of the rest have about 5 minutes per hour tops (incredibly little!). There are 2 or 3 'superstations' -- local stations that have set up to rebroadcast nationwide over XM -- which have normal radio station ads. These are ones like KISS-FM from Los Angeles. I skip those.
But for now... I have some nice mellow trance to listen to at the office that I've never heard before. Bliss.
revar and I got into early on was XM Satellite Radio. Niether of us could stand our local stations most of the time, and even with monstrous MP3 collections it's nice to have someone/something expose you to new music now and then. There's a lot of things to like about it: nationwide coverage, little or no commercials, tons of genres of music, displayed artist/title information, higher quality sound. The disads were few, but notable: $10/mo subscription. Expensive hardware. Mobile only (in-car). This balances out more to the advantage side, so we both got one. I became quickly addicted to a few channels: 80s on 8, Cinemagic, Audio Visions, and four varieties of Bad Techno channels from 81 to 84. Much with the thumpa-thumpa-trance.I ended up picking up a Pioneer XM module with the FM modulator and installing it in my GL1800 motorcycle. It fit exactly into the slot where the crappy and overpriced Hondaline CD player would go, and integrated well with the radio. The controls were too small to work easily with the gloves on, but it worked well enough. The sound was great, but things in the motorcycle headsets had to compete with the wind anyways. I wanted to install one in the van or at home if possible so I could get my Bad Techno more often than when I was riding the 'wing. I just couldn't justify spending another $10 a month (as the subscription price is per radio not per person). This problem decided to solve itself this past week in an annoying but affective way.
The short of it is that I didn't waterseal the grommets into the radio-space of the GL1800's trunk properly. Riding in the rain caused water to wick up under the trunk assembly and follow the cables to the radio itself. It took a few days for the electronics inside to corrode. Luckily for me, my GMRS radio is a waterproof handheld so it survived nicely. The XM display first started to flicker now and then. Eventually it just refused to turn on. Greeeeat. Well, time to replace it if I want to keep the tunes.
Luckily technology marches on. The 2nd generation of XM players has been released, and the best of them so far was the Delphi SKYFi unit. My integration side loves this dang thing, 'cause it's all so modular.
One buys the main unit by itself for about $120 (less than half the cost of the now-dead Pioneer unit). The box is about the size of two decks of cards side by side, and contains the user interface and XM codec. You get a remote control and a manual with it -- nothing else. It makes no sound on its own, and is rather useless in this state. To get sound out of it, you need to buy 'application cradles'. There are currently three of them: A car one, a home-stereo one, and a boombox one.
The car stereo one is about $60, and mounts to the dash. One wires it into the car's power, sets the antenna (included with the cradle) on the roof, and hooks up the audio (either direct to an aux jack, via casette adaptor or using an additonal-cost FM modulator). Then just plunk the main unit into the cradle. The home one is the same price and comes with a bigger indoor antenna, a wall-wart, and RCA outs to hook into the home stereo. The home one works through the roof decently well, and the antenna is waterproof with a 25ft cable, so you can mount it outside if you need to. I bought one of each: one for the van and the living room. After the rainy season is over I'll get kits for the two bikes.
The nifty one, though, is the new 'boombox' option:
This provides power via either a wall wart (included) or 10 D-cell batteries. It has the same antenna as the home kit with an internal wind-up storage area for the cabling and a mount on the back. When the antenna is clipped to the box it looks like part of the unit, nicely self-contained. The radio clicks into the front. I've got it sitting on my desk at work right now, playing some 80's tunes. With both a south-facing window and a nearby terrestrial repeater the signal strengths on both antennas (XM antennas are dual satellte/terrestrial units) are at full power. If i'd had trouble I could have run the antenna out against the window, but no need. The box gets more than loud enough but it's no super-quality jam-crate. It's got a headphone jack and works well with the etymotic earphones.
This little box made my day, XM-radio-wise. I still only pay for one subscription (I transferred from the dead box to the live one; they do that for free) but now I get tunes in all my vehicles, my home, and my office. Other units are supposedly on the way, such as a fat-walkman style one with the antenna on the headset band and a 'standalone cradle' that has an FM retransmitter that one only needs to set within a few feet of any radio. Since it's made by Delphi (GM auto electronics), the cradle for this unit will start getting made into OEM harnesses on new cars. The display shows more data in a much nicer UI than any other model and it's the cheapest model out there.
Some of my friends have expressed worry about XM 'going away'. It looks like they should be sticking around a bit. Their competition (Sirius) is dying, doing the bankruptcy thing right now. I feel bad about that, since it was 9-11 that pretty much hosed them -- their main offices were in the twin towers, and the destruction set back their funding and public release hugely, which lead to most of their problems and XM's dominance. While sad for competition, it's good for us XM folk: some of their exclusive agreements (like NPR) may now get to defect over and thus improve XM's service. XM's also made-or-beat subscriber estimates for the last two terms now, and there's hope they'll be way ahead on the next one. This little Delphi unit is being mass-marketed at the usual outlets and the on-net hype (such as fan-groups and hardware hackers) is getting a good head of steam. The company running XM also announced they have enough investment cash to last through "cash flow breakeven". I'm hoping this all adds up to there being a service for my radio hardware to listen to for a long time to come.
I also hope satellite radio gives the local radio stations a good kick in the teeth. Most of the bay-area radio stations suck, following mass-market formulas. If something good and original pops its head up, one of the bigger stations or nationwide congloms comes and buys it up and crushes its soul into some cookie-cutter clone station. I know that XM has some Great Evils as investors (like Clear Channel), but the advantage it has is it's big enough to allow obscure genres to exist... and it gives me the option to pay a small fee so that I don't have to listen to 25 minutes of ads per hour of programming. About 1/3rd of the channels have no ads at all. Most of the rest have about 5 minutes per hour tops (incredibly little!). There are 2 or 3 'superstations' -- local stations that have set up to rebroadcast nationwide over XM -- which have normal radio station ads. These are ones like KISS-FM from Los Angeles. I skip those.
But for now... I have some nice mellow trance to listen to at the office that I've never heard before. Bliss.
