I choose to live 30 miles from my office. It is not a unique choice. In fact, around 500,000 other folks who commute into and out of Philadelphia each day share my choice to raise their families in a small suburban community. With so many major highways in the area the one-way trip can be as short as 30 minutes. But alas, add my fellow commuters, tourists to the big city and folks just passing through, and the daily quality time that I spend in my car ranges from 2 to 3 hours on an average day. Insert the excitement of sun glare, rain, snow or sleet and 4 to 5 hours becomes the norm.
When it is just me, I'm a channel surfer. I have such a wide and varied palette for entertainment that I am consistently racing between country, rock, R&B, jazz, pop, talk, traffic and religious feeds. Mix in the audio CDs and it is a mobile par-tay. However, after 10 years of the same commute I've memorized all of the commercials and have been through so many new morning show personalities that I can now predict which format each station's program director will try next.
So I asked Santa for an XM satellite radio and started my subscription in early January 2009. I wasn't so sure about paying for audio when we had so many choices in Philadelphia, but it was most definitely a high-tech toy and I'm always down for that. Amazon had a holiday bundle of the Delphi XPressRC XM receiver, the car and home installation kits. I took the plunge and in short order, there was an XM satellite radio that I could move between the car and the kitchen.
So far there are two technology purchases that have been extreme milestones in my life. The first was when my wife and I discovered we could afford a portable video cassette player that fit in our Dodge Caravan. We even refer to it in geologic terms of "before video" (BV) and "after video" (AV). All of a sudden the thought of strapping two car seats into the minivan was no longer a chore. The second was when I discovered XM Satellite Radio. I had no idea. Short of stopping strangers on the street, I have told just about every acquaintance I have about the joy's of XM. Over 200 channels of most every genre of music, live cable news channel feeds, talk radio, play-by-play sports (lots of sports), metropolitan traffic and weather. Moreover, unless the channel is a mirror of a terrestrial feed, the broadcast is commercial free...wow.
Our local terrestrial feed of Radio Disney is broadcast on AM and depending on location, the reception is pretty awful. Now it comes through in crystal clear digital audio no matter where we are in the city or if we are on a trip to the mountains or the shore (that is of course when the kids are not plugged into the headphones of their DVD players). I've fallen into listening to delayed broadcast of the morning show of BBC Radio 1 - something that is just not possible with my analog antenna or a even an HD digital radio.
Instantly my commute became enjoyable. There was no way that I could park myself on the couch and watch the news hour each night but now I can multi-task and listen to the audio of my favorite news programs on the way home. I feel plugged into society. Rather than the commute being lost "down" time it is now my most productive "up" time for business news, commentary and general culture. My wife even now has ten country stations to choose from. I'm the primary cook in our household so meal preparation in the kitchen became "up" time as well. Extreme happiness...
Until Sunday, April 11, 2010... that is the day my Delphi XpressRC XM receiver stopped working. No pop, smoke or whirls... just....dead. No reset button, no secret switch or Ctrl-Alt-Del combo. I scrambled for technical support and learned there are no user-serviceable components. Dead = Dead.
Thats when the panic set in. I was really surprised how poorly I was taking this. It wasn't the price of the equipment - my convertible was totaled a while back and replaced with the Corolla - and I didn't feel nearly this badly. I'm pretty sure it was the loss of connectivity to the "cloud". I have not taken the smart phone plunge but I'm aware of the studies that report an increase in "iPhone addiction". It was the feeling of missing out on the conversation, the conversion back to "down" time.
I spent Monday with my CD/AM/FM system and it was worse than I remembered. Over lunch I surfed for recent customer reviews on the Delphi XPressRC radio and noticed several other users had experienced the same problem - it just stopped working. I was tempted to swap out my radio with a new one but was put off by the Dead = Dead feature. But then I discovered the new XM Onyx radio. The customer reviews were positive. Folks did not have problems with it reseting or dying and it even cost one-third the price of the XPressRC. The Onyx does not record songs nor does it scroll stock prices and sports scores, but it has one big advantage over the XPressRC... it works.
Not willing to wait for UPS, my local Walmart had the Onyx/Car Kit combo in stock so I picked one up on my way home. The technical support folks were not sure if I could use my existing car and home docking installations with a different XM radio, but the Onyx turned out to be 100% compatible with the XPressRC accessories. It plugged directly into the dock and after a simple phone call to XM to swap radio IDs, I was up and running. The Onyx even responds to the remote that was included with my home installation kit.
I'm delighted the Onyx designers chose not to change the form factor. And now I have an additional car kit that I can install into our SUV that we use to haul our toys. I'm not overjoyed that I have to admit my addiction. But I will simply add it to my box of additions already containing water, food and sleep.
