I'm afraid I have to take issue with most of your statements here...

First consider XM Radio and Sirius, both of which are audio-only services.

In order to receive the satellite signal, you must have an unobstructed line
of sight between the satellite and the receiving antenna. That's not much of
a problem if you live out in the middle of Kansas or Arizona someplace.

But if you live in someplace like Chicago, when you go downtown in your car
you are almost guaranteed not to have that line of sight, because it's
blocked by all the buildings. There are also numerous places where you might
be stuck under an overpass or in a tunnel for a few minutes. Again, no line
of site.

So, the satellite radio providers install low power repeaters to handle
these dead spots. You're trucking along listening to satellite radio and you
get stuck in a tunnel waiting for the light to change. No more satellite
signal. So your radio just grabs the signal from the repeater which has been
installed to provide coverage in the tunnel. When you come out of the
tunnel, it goes back to satellite reception. NOTE: I know that there is some
buffering and other tricks that are used, but they aren't really germane to
this discussion.

That's why you have the repeaters.

Now for the equipment. I just went to www.bestbuy.com, and they offer both
XM and Sirius receivers for under $60.00. Since I spent nearly $200.00 on my
MP3 player I don't consider $60.00 to be expensive.

While both XM and Sirius offer receivers, you don't have to buy the
equipment from them. If you don't want to buy your receiver from them you
can go to Best Buy or Ace's Radio Ranch or wherever and buy equipment that
will work with their system.

Now let's get back to aviation...

Sirius doesn't offer weather, so we have to look at XM only. They don't sell
any equipment that I can find. On their "equipment" web page all they have
is links to companies such as Garmin and Avidyne and folks like that. Once
again, you can buy your equipment wherever you want to.

For a total store-bought solution you can get XM Weather and XM Radio on the
Garmin GPSMAP 496 for about $2,500.00. And that comes with a free GPS. If
you're willing to roll your own you can get it even cheaper.

I will agree with you that both XM Radio and Sirius are paying way too much
for their "talent"...



"Blueskies" wrote in message
t...

"601XL Builder" wrDOTgiacona@suddenlinkDOTnet wrote in message
...
: Blueskies wrote:
:
:
: That is exactly what I had in mind. Odd that is does not get the press
that Garmin and XM get...
:
:
:
:
: It's not odd at all. It's not an open service meaning you have to use
: their expensive hardware.

Sirius and XM are both closed systems that require their expensive
hardware. I was just reading in Avweek that XM has
over 800 ground stations to supplement their signals, and Sirius, because
of their three '24 hour' satellites, only has
a few hundred ground stations. Neither of these systems has ever made any
money, and the are making very bad business
decisions ($500 million for Stern?!).

I think it is odd that they get all this press...