Something's dogging the Dog Star

I've been a Sirius Satellite Radio subscriber for years now and have really appreciated having the service. In some ways, radio is even more important to me than the television. Being a graduate student with a full-time job, I don't have a lot of time to watch television, but I do appreciate having music in the background.

Lately, however, things have been a little different with Sirius. After Sirius and XM merged, a number of stations that I enjoyed listening to changed names, playlists and personalities. Although I am as resistant to change as anyone else, I know that I will eventually get settled into a new set of favorite stations. The problem is not really any of these changes, but rather a decline in the quality of the signal itself.

I have a Stiletto 2. I used to dock it using a vehicle kit in the house and it worked very well, in spite of the fact that I live in an apartment with west facing windows on the west coast of the US (Sirius recommends facing your home antenna toward northern Minnesota, which for me is to the northeast.) Recently for aesthetic reasons, I switched to a home dock and my troubles began. I often lose the signal. I am not sure right now if the problem is due to the dock or to local weather conditions and I will have to troubleshoot to see if I can solve the problem.

That problem is really the easy one to fix. Another problem is entirely out of my hands. Stations have started to broadcast the emergency alert system warning tones on a regular and more frequent basis. These are neither tests, which Sirius normally announces, or real alerts. Rather, they happen randomly, sometimes as often as every fifteen minutes.

When the buzzing of the emergency alert is not happening, another problem can occur. Short, random segments of another song will briefly interrupt the broadcast of whatever song is supposed to be playing. This is not only annoying, but it makes the use of the recording feature built into the Stiletto 2 hard to rely upon. To make matters worse, some stations that formerly allowed recording no longer do so. This started happening after the recent channel realignment. I have yet to find a reliable report about if and when Sirius will fix the problem.

Until then, I will wait patiently. Satellite radio has become part of my routine. I can't say that I will wait forever, though. Internet radios like the Squeezebox Boom are looking mighty tempting right about now. Hopefully they are more reliable than my Siruis service has been.