With the Sirius satellite radio, you can start at the Eastern seaboard and drive to the California coast listening to the same radio station with near perfect reception. Even better, you have your choice of sixty commercial-free music stations and forty sports, news, and entertainment channels (or streams as they are called in the satellite world). The streams are varied and are of excellent quality. Just about every music genre is covered including pop, rock, country, hip hop, R&B, dance, jazz, classical, and variety.

I especially enjoyed listening to the jazz and country streams. I was surprised to find that I also enjoyed listening to CNBC, CNN, and the FOX news channel which seem to be broadcasts of the television feeds. There are also many special broadcasts that are quite enjoyable. These include things like a Dean Martin tribute weekend, and replays of live performances.

Three satellites in high-angle elliptical orbits over the U.S. provide the streams, but you need a special Sirius radio receiver to pull in the satellite radio. These can be purchased pre-installed on many new cars including certain models of   Ford, Chrysler, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Volvo, Mazda, Dodge, Jeep, Volkswagen, Audi, Nissan, and Infiniti vehicles. Or they can be purchased as an after-market add-on for older vehicles. I tested a Kenwood unit with an adapter kit and antenna that allowed it to be installed in my 1996 car.

Depending on the make and model of your older vehicle, the unit itself may wind up in a fairly awkward position, as it did in my car. The installation looked fine, but the radio was positioned so low that the display could not be easily read from either the driver or passenger seat.  No problem. The Kenwood unit came with a remote control. Unfortunately, the remote was one of the most complex units I’ve ever seen. It has certain buttons which were not clearly marked that acted as toggle switches, but I could never figure out what position the toggle was in. After six weeks of using it, I still could not make it perform as I would have liked it to.

All-in-all though, I really liked Sirius. Great quality reception paired with excellent programming gets my thumbs-up. Yet, I don’t spend enough time in my car to make it worth the equipment costs and the $12.95 a month fee. Those of you who travel a lot, however, will find it worthwhile. Get it installed in a new car if you can. If you think you would use the remote control a lot, look at a different tuner, with a better remote control. Several other manufacturers also make Sirius tuners.

Since I received my Sirius radio, Sirius has announced new plug & play portable units that can be used in the car and carried into the home, office, or boat and used there as well. I am looking forward to reviewing one of these units which would be much more usable for a person like me who doesn’t spend much time in the car. (I’m also curious about a new feature called S-Seek that is to allow listeners to be notified when their favorite songs are playing on any of Sirius’ streams.)