Sanyo CRSR-10 SIRIUS Radio Receiver with Home and Car Kit

Considering it comes with the equivalent of both a full house and car kit along with the receiver, and even three interchangeable colored skins (black, chrome and metallic blue), this is the most affordable plug-and-play Sirius kit available.

This unit has an exceptionally powerful FM transmitter; I feel as if I'm a pirate broadcaster as I drive down the road, and I now want a bumper sticker that reads, "What am I listening to? Tune in to 89.3!" When I have it hooked up in my home, I can tune into it from any room in the house with any radio my family owns. Very sweet, and very handy.

Reception is very good provided you properly place the antennae. A built in on-screen antenna aiming meter helps this task greatly. The bright and clear LCD display holds multiple lines of information in various font sizes, which is superior to some earlier equipment sets. Because of this I can, at a glance, find out my signal strength, channel name, channel number, preset position (if applicable), song title, artist, and genre. I would need to cycle through several button presses to get the same information on my wife's in-car permanent unit, installed a year ago.

Another very handy feature is the memory seek. If you are listening to a track you really like, hit the 'memo' button and the receiver will now watch all the channels for a reoccurance of that song. If it should come on, the receiver will beep and display the song title and the station it is currently appearing on. You can either ignore this helpful hint, or frantically pound the 'select' button to switch to the featured channel to catch that precious track. I've used it when I am hearing the tail end of a song and want to hear the beginning someday...

On the down-side, I'm not sure about the longevity of this suction-cup based mounting system for use in the car. I would rather have a cigarette lighter hard mount because the suction cup mount ensures that you must have the unit hovering over your dashboard, potentially in your line of sight. While it looks a bit like a rice-burner-tuner-kid's high-tech instrument cluster from where I've mounted it (close to the driver side a-pillar) I feel just a bit squeamish having my equipment so visible to those around me. Also, disconnecting and reconnecting the unit requires pulling and plugging in two wires: one for power and the other for the antenna. This may ultimately result in the wires or the jacks wearing out one day. In this manner, competing units that use a cradle connection may be longer lasting. This seems excusable until you realise that the system comes with a modular wire harness, into which you are connecting said wires. If it just came with two of these harnesses, you wouldn't have had to constantly plug and unplug the wires.

Also, while the unit installs easily, running the antenna wire through your car is not for the faint-hearted. I am no pro, but I am also not without a bit of experience in and around cars. It took me two hours in a heated garage (I live in Michigan, and did the installation at Christmastime) to carefully route the antenna wire through moldings and behind body panels to the mount-point of the unit in the car. The result is one I'm very happy with, but it could have been easier.