I totally agree about the Onyx. I don't keep up with PNP receivers like a used to so I don't now if the ones they sell today are different versions from a few years ago or not, but I had one for a little over a week and returned it. A few years ago my wife and I went to the Spring NASCAR races in both Dover and Pocono in one trip. It was a spur of the moment thing and I let a friend of mine borrow my trusty Roady XT that normally was used in my car a few days prior. So the Friday before the Saturday morning that we left for Dover I went to Best Buy and bought the best Plug and Play receiver they had and it was the Onyx.
Besides it's insanely weak FM modulator, which I expected and slow channel changing, I had a ton of dropouts along I476 and I95 among other places. The dropouts on 95 heading from Dover to Pocono were worse then when I was heading to Dover. I was using the antenna that I was using for the Roady XT, but I had the packaging from the Onyx in the car, so one night in the hotel parking lot I swapped antennas hoping that would make a difference but it didn't. I ended up returning the Onxy at a Best Buy on the way back from the trip and just listened to music from my phone the rest of the way home. I've been to both of those tracks many times before with my Roady XT and never had an issue. I haven't been back since, but I will be at the Fall Dover race this year for the first time with a vehicle with built in satellite.
The Onyx even felt cheaply made. Throughout the years, up until the merger, I owned just about every PNP receiver in the XM SkyFi and Roady lines and every Sirius receiver in the Sportster and Starmate lines, aside from the display of the Onyx, I fail to see how it's better than any of those old product lines. I couldn't wait to get the old Roady XT back. Not to totally toot the horn of the old Roady, not sure if it's because that was XM and now with it being built into my new ride I'm using the Sirius satellites or what. But last month when I went to the Blue Ridge Mountains I took partially the same route that I took to the Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, PA a while back and I had a bunch of short droupouts on US 219, This time reception was perfect.
I would try a different antenna. And then I would consider something other then the Onyx, if there's even anything. I am so glad we don't have plug and play receivers at all anymore. My wife loved whatever version of the Sportster she had in her '06 Zephyr for years. Once I got my new [to me] '13 Navigator with Sirius XM built it she found it hard to go back to using a plug and play in her car, so at the end of last year when she got the Expedition, even though [at the time] she didn't care about the navigation features she just had to have the touch screen for SXM.
