Actual technology used on SiriusXM radios

PasTypique said:

I believe that they did reduce the number of terrestrial transmitters...greatly. I used to be able to see two signals on my XM radio: satellite and terrestrial. Now I only see satellite. While driving in the southeast Michigan area, the radio will drop out under just about every overpass. It didn't do this ten years ago. I'm sure it's all about the money and there's no revenue stream from having repeaters.

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We could use the terrestrial repeaters here in Boise. Everytime I go downtown, goodbye signal...

Scott Greczkowski said:

The company I work for runs a few of the XM repeaters here in Connecticut.

The first ones were huge and heated the entire place. The new ones are much much smaller and run a lot less hot.

I will have to dig and see if I can find pictures of what we called The Beast.

We also ran Sirius repeaters as well.

Depending on you unit you can get into diagnostics mode and see the signal strength of both satellite and terrestrial as shown below.

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+1 I can tell the difference since they went to XM’s repeaters

I can clearly tell the difference that XM system sounds clearer. Though these days both sound worse than HD Radio. I have a 2016 Mazda CX5 Grand Touring. The SXM radio in it doesn't go any higher than the channel 200's (sports stuff). I'm missing out on channels in the 300's like Faction the covers channel, velvet, rockbar, utopia, rock and roll hall of fame radio, etc..

If I were to get it again I would just use the streaming service and bluetooth it to the car. More channels, on demand, better audio quality.

For all the years these services have been out, I am quite surprised that nobody has cracked this yet. I remember the cracking/hacking game was huge in the days of Videocipher I/II, cable descrambling, cubes, filters, universal descramblers, 3 musketeers hack, stb cloning, card cloning, card emulation, etc.. No one ever seemed to figure out Sat radio.

I doubt there’s much demand. Why hack it if you can’t sell the hack?

We have a subscription for about another month. Even still, that stupid radio defaults back to the “Subscribe to SXM” channel. Kinda stupid, and annoying.


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cypherstream said:

No one ever seemed to figure out Sat radio.

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Modern demodulation and decryption is done mostly inside VLSI chips so breaking into it is next to impossible and emulating it in a combination of hardware and software is difficult. Gone are the days of pithing circuit boards with logic probes to see what is going on.

navychop said:

I doubt there’s much demand. Why hack it if you can’t sell the hack?

We have a subscription for about another month. Even still, that stupid radio defaults back to the “Subscribe to SXM” channel. Kinda stupid, and annoying.


Sent from my iPhone using the SatelliteGuys app!

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Mine does that when I pull into the garage. If I lose the signal before I shut the truck off, it will revert to the demo channel when I back out the next time and it receives the signal again. It usually takes me a few minutes to realize it. Just as I'm getting out of the neighborhood, I'll wonder why the heck I'm hearing commercials.