Pioneer GEX-P10XMT Satellite Radio Receiver

For people who travel at least an hour a day in their vehicle, XM radio is a wonderful thing - to have 100 channels of music and information at your fingertips, with over 40 commercial-free channels, will make even the most jaded radio listener's mouth water.

Pioneer provides two units which allow car owners to access XM radio; the GEX-900XM is unit for Pioneer XM-capable head units, while the GEX-FM903XM has its own display and puts out a FM-modulated signal that can be picked up by any car stereo. This review is of a GEX-900XM which I've had connected to my DEH-P9300 head unit for a couple of months.

Let's start with installation: my number one recommendation would be don't do it yourself, since Circuit City will install any XM receiver you buy from them for free, and guarantees the install for the life of your car. If you are more of a do-it-yourselfer, the remote unit is small and can be tucked away nearly anywhere, though you'd probably want to mount it relatively close to the head unit for the P-bus connection.

Since you will be receiving a satellite signal, the antenna needs to be positioned with a clear view of the sky. This does not mean, however, that you are forced to mount the antenna on the outside of the car: mine is attached to the rear shelf of my Contour with some velcro, and the signal has always been plenty strong unless I'm parked in the garage or under an overhang. Keep in mind that in many areas, XM has installed repeaters which the radio can use where the satellite signal would typically get blocked, so the dreaded "NO SIGNAL" message is the exception not the rule.

Once you've got the unit installed and the antenna positioned properly, you need to get your XM account activated. This involves paying a one-time fee of $10-15, and leaving the unit turned on to the preview channel for 15-30 minutes while it downloads an activation key. Tip: save five bucks and do it online.

All of this is great, you might be thinking, but what's it like to use this unit on the road? The way Pioneer has integrated the GEX-P900XM into their head units, it's like having 100 CD-quality radio stations that can be browsed in the usual fashion, searched by format, or locked into one of 18 presets. While I can't fault the way they've set up tuning from station to station (which is the important part), I'd like to kick the engineer who didn't think to take full advantage of XM's capability to display channel, artist and title on the three line display that comes standard Pioneer head units. Despite repeated efforts, I could only get one of these to display at a time, so you end up defaulting to the channel display, wondering who the artist and/or title was of that catchy tune you just heard. Arrgh. This is the main reason I'm giving the unit an average rating - with a little more work it could have been SO much better.

Still, with this one caveat aside, there are few accessories more useful for the person who spends time on the road than an XM reciever. That having been said, this unit is the obvious choice if you have a Pioneer XM-capable head unit.

Let me finish this review with some practical advice: XM units you can use at home and in the car can be overkill. If you have digital cable or satellite TV, an XM receiver replicates functionality that exists on the digital music channels. In the event that there's one or more XM channels that you simply must have at home, it only costs an additional 33 cents per day to buy service for a unit optimized for home use, and you'll never have to worry about moving units, broken mounting brackets etc. Permanently mounting a unit in the car also minimizes the chance of theft.

Just my two cents. Hope regardless of what you decide that this review helped your decision process.