Directed Electronics Sportster Replay Sirius Receiver

So you're thinking about paying for radio? Are you Sirius? Or are you XM? The first thing you need to do when making the decision to take on yet another monthly payment is to figure out which service to order, Sirius or XM. The 2 advantages to XM are that they have a better selection of portable satellite receivers, and it's slightly less expensive at $10 vs. $13 per month. For me, the programming is what makes the biggest difference between the two. Sirius has contracts with most of the major professional sports conglomerates, including NFL, NHL, NBA, College Sports & soon, NASCAR. XM has Baseball and probably some other boring sports like bowling. And while both companies have about 60 channels of music, only Sirius remains commercial free. It's too bad the talk, and sports stations aren't commercial free too. So lets recap: Sirius has commercial free music, tons of sports programming for only $3 additional/month. Plus, Sirius is about to come out with some pretty slick portable devices, and in January 2006, they're adding Howard Stern.

So now that you've come to your senses about which service to get, you now need to decide which receiver to buy. The problem with satellite radio is that they make you pay per device. Not pay per household. So if you want a dedicated satellite car stereo, you pay $13/month. And if you want to pipe that into your house, you have to first buy another receiver, and yes, get charged a second fee! Luckily, the fee is reduced to $6.99 for each additional unit. Being the tightwad that I am, I wanted a portable unit that would plug into my car, but could quickly come out and be plugged into a home base. That brings the useability factor way up, and the monthly bill way down. These types are called the "Plug & Play Portable Units"

At last count, there were 16 Plug & Play Portable units that are Sirius compatible. Only 2 have the "replay" feature. This feature works much like TiVO, in that it constantly records whatever you're listening to. That means you can pause live radio, rewind, or fast forward back to real time. I wasn't sure if this feature would be worth the extra $70 I needed to pony up for it, but after one short week, I can tell you that YES, IT'S WORTH IT! I piped in my first Detroit Lions game last week and while listening, my 2.3 year old son kept interrupting to drag me out to play. I simply hit the pause button and spent the next half hour with him. After he was pacified, I went back in and listened to the game. I fast forwarded through the all the commercials, and in less than 15 minutes, was caught back up to real time. This happened 2 or 3 times during the game, and I never missed a down.

During the week, the Sportster Replay sits on my desk at work. When customers walk in, or a phone call comes in; I usually prefer to pause the music rather than turn it down. This way, I can focus on the person better. This happens several times a day, so it's not unusual to be behind "real time" by 30+ minutes. The advantage to this is that when a song comes on that I don't care for, rather than turn the station, I simply skip over it! This is also a very handy feature for talk radio. Since I hate commercials, I like to pause when one comes on, I go about my work, I then unpause and skip right over the commercials with a few clicks. The nice thing about Sirius is that they tag the beginning of each song and commercial, so when you hit the forward or rewind buttons, everything is cued up the next item. Much like skipping songs on a CD, the next selection is cued up.

This model also has Game Zone and Game Alert features. So when your favorite sports teams come on, the unit will remind you. If you choose to ignore the game, you can listen to music and have the score updates pop up automatically when someone scores. I'm not sure how NBA will handle this with so much scoring, so it's probably on a timer.

The one bummer (just like TiVO) is that if you change stations, you lose your cached memory. You start over. And no, you can't record on one channel while listening to another. You also can't save the memory or download it. Also, if you were to take it from a home base to the car, it would unplug, and therefore loose the memory. Too bad this unit doesn't have a 9 volt backup battery so transporting the unit would preserve the memory.

Also, included is a "memo" feature. This is handy if you like a song, and want to save the title and artist info. Simply hit memo, and its' saved. This unit will also tell you when one of your saved memo songs is playing on another station. With the touch of a single button, you can switch!

A "Jump" button allows one to save a channel button to quick access stuff like weather or traffic reports. Unfortunately, only the largest cities in the U.S. currently offer traffic and weather reports. Sirius promises smaller cities are coming soon.

I'm not sure if other Sirius devices have any kind of tone control, but this unit does not. Which is unfortunate, since I like to run this directly to my computer speakers, I have no way of adjusting the sound quality. Not that I really need to, as the sound is terrific.

In the car at night, I find the contrast settings are not strong enough. Even with optimizing the settings, the contrast is still weak.

The unit I bought came with a car installation kit. The low profile antenna sits on the roof with a magnet. A very strong window suction cup mount is included, but I elected to drill a couple of holes in my Honda Element and make it a more permanent installation. The unit has a built in FM Transmitter, but I chose to use the Aux out feature since the Element has a standard Aux in on my model. - This assures static will never be an issue. So far, I've had nothing but flawless reception. Not a single drop out. Not even on a cloudy day like today. I wish I could rave about the home kit being as good. Reception behind a glass window is not the preferred setup. In my case, it's getting the job done, but I have occasional drop outs in the office, even though the unit and antenna are sitting still.

Overall, this unit combined with the Sirius subscription is a joy to have and operate. It has completely changed (upgraded) my lifestyle. How many things can do that for $13/month? This is one of those products that comes with a bit of regret. - Regret for not buying sooner than you did.