To Whom It May Concern

The Ongoing Adventures of Sirius Satellite Radio!!!

My buddy midas bought me a lovely early Christmas/coming home gift... the Sirius satellite radio. I finally installed it when I got out here to San Diego, and I really do like the music, it has stations of rock, classical, rap, old time music, new music, comedy, news, sports, you name it.

This receiver transmits to my factory radio using FM signals. Now, typically you tune your factory radio to a spot on the FM dial that is all static, and then broadcast on that channel from the Sirius receiver. This works well, unless you are in an area like San Diego, where EVERY spot on the FM dial is cluttered. If there isn't a radio station on the frequency in question, there's crossover traffic from stations on either side of that frequency.

This causes my satellite radio to sound more like AM radio than even FM, much less the crystal clear sound that digital satellite radio supposedly is famous for. On a recent trip to Arizona, the sound was crystal clear, so it's the clutter on the FM dial in San Diego that is causing the problem.

I called Sirius about the problem and they recommended an "FM modulator". So yesterday morning I went to Fry's Electronics to find one. Now, Fry's is one awesome store in terms of size and content, but I waited for 10 minutes in the car audio department, then finally went and found a manager to get some help, which seemed rather ridiculous, considering that the store had like no customers at the time. When someone finally arrived to help, I realized that an FM modulator would need a power source, which was unfortunate, because my car has only one power outlet (cigarette lighter) and it would already be used by the Sirius receiver.

The sales associate recommended a new product from Sirius, the Wired FM Modulator. For $20, this product would wire direct into your antenna port on the back of the stock radio, and then you plug your antenna into a tiny black box, and you plug a wire into the output on the Sirius receiver, for crystal clear sound, without the need for external power either.

I bought it, then took my dash all apart to get to the stock radio. As I pulled the antenna out of the back of the radio, I noticed a problem. Dodge is now using a different antenna plug than what I was accustomed to. The typical plug for antenna had always been a male plug with a smaller male plug at the end that looked like a large needle. The Dodge antenna plug, however, was a plastic male plug with a female plug in the center, looking more like a electrical plug than an antenna plug. So now I have my dash all torn apart and I can't even use the product I took the dash apart for.

No big deal right? I'll just get myself a couple of adapters for the plugs. So back to Fry's I went, and this time waited for 15 minutes for an associate to show up before going and getting another manager so I could get some help. "Oh yah we have just what you need" and the sales associate brought out the adapter, of which I would need two for the stock radio and stock antenna plug. Then I saw the price, $19 bucks a piece.

So now I was dealing with one $20 FM adapter, and two $19 adapters to make the primary adapter work. Overall the cost of the adapters was getting up to the cost of the Sirius radio itself, not to mention the cluster of wires and plugs and general clutter that I was going to have to deal with. This went beyond my tolerance for a reasonable fix to make this radio work correctly.

Because of this and the crappy service I got at Fry's, I returned the original adapter and got my money back. I called Sirius and told them that it would be in their best interest to make a version of the FM adapter that works with the newer antenna plugs, but I doubt that will make any difference. Now I'm looking to use a low power FM wire transmitter that was used with the earlier model. These are hard to find though, sold out on most of the websites I've looked at. Fortunately Sirius is selling them with some of their new sets, so I should be able to get one before too long. I can't believe it's so difficult just to get this to work right, though.