Recent content by aegrotatio

On the XM side, each satellite powers two transponders: one is aimed primarily at the East, the other at the West. The Western satellite does the same. That makes a total of four transponders serving the continent. As for your comment about SiriusXM marketing posting about ASICs on Wikipedia...

By the way, the Ku-band repeaters are only on the Sirius side of SiriusXM. The XM side's repeaters takes the strongest signals from the main S-band satellites and rebroadcasts them on the terrestrial band. The XM side of SiriusXM is better in just about every way. The one thing that made the...

The 3-satellite Sirius constellation was shut down years ago. Now it's just the two geostationary satellites. In future years Sirius will be shut down and XM will use all four geostationary satellites, each of which were designed to support the entire bandwidth used by both Sirius and XM.

Waste of time and money. When I renewed my XM sub, I deleted the "All Access" and haven't gone back.

The AlphaStar dish is very well suited for Ku-band. My first encounter with AlphaStar was an FTA receiver tuned to receive Chinese programming and GlobalStar in the 1990s and 2000s.

The newest boombox seems to work with both the old Sirius radios and XM radios. I tested it and was pleasantly surprised, though there is no real reason to bother with the Sirius side with its blotchy audio quality. I got it from one of the online stores bundled with a receiver for a little...

Looks like the HEO satellites are done. The date has passed (set in 2008) to decommission them. Sirius FM-5 and FM-6 are co-located with XM-5 and XM-6, respectively. Sirius FM-5 was supposed to hang around 96 degrees but they changed their mind for some reason. Anyone notice a reduction in...

I used to have lots of family plan radios. Now I just have one plug-and-play radio that I carry around wherever I go, and the Internet Smartphone App add-on to use where the satellite signal doesn't work. At home I also use the internet radio on a PC with an FM transmitter for around-the-house...

The Sirius repeaters tuned to a Ku-band transponder on AMC-16 and rebroadcast them. The XM repeaters took two of the four transponders from one (or both) of the XM 85-degree or 115-degree satellite and rebroadcast them. It's arguable to say which system was more elegant, but the XM system was...

The talk stations were moved to really out-of-the-way channel numbers recently. It's a good thing for the XM network to finally get that "up to 410 kbps" of bandwidth back from Clear Channel. I wouldn't be too excited about additional channels unless you have one of the newest radios that...

There may be one of two problems happening: Antenna quality or signal coverage changes. XM and Sirius antennae have linear amplifiers inside them that slowly wear out over time. If you're still under warranty ask the dealer to take a look. If they want to charge money for the repair consider...

Thanks JSheridan, that explains it.

Voice over IP (VoIP) is actively being used on Exede and even original WildBlue. It works. The compression makes up for some of the delay, if you can believe it. It's hard to describe but the voice delay is not much more than that of a cell phone.

Why do people think Exede and Hughesnet are going to be the same? Sure, they use the same reflector and different TRIAs and modems. This dealer sounds like they are selling both Exede and Hughesnet services and are economizing on their inventory. I don't understand how it makes sense that...

Please turn off the meta-refresh feature. It's killing this web site. I know you want more ad impressions and all that, but this isn't how you do it. It makes the forum nearly impossible to read.