Satellite Radio

Here at home, music is served up in the Emperor via MP3s recorded on 10 CDs stored in a changer in the trunk. I have not listened to over the air radio for, well, as far back as I can remember (which due to repeated drug use in my youth, is not far), so what was I to do for two weeks in a rental car. It will be a base model, so would it have an iPod interface? Doesn’t matter, don’t have one anyway. Probably have a CD player, but all my audio CDs are long gone. Satellite radio? Doubtful. Hey wait a minute, a friend in the Miata Club has an extra Sirius unit that I could borrow, brilliant.

For testing purposes I temporarily hooked up the Visor in the Miata. Not bad, there were a couple channels I could enjoy and even a few I could listen to for a while, nice.

The expected Chrysler Sebring turned into a Ford Mustang and it had a CD player that read MP3s. I had brought along a couple of my Radio Paradise MP3 CDs for listening to on the laptop in case of spotty internet or whatever, so I popped one in and off we went.

The Mustang even had an extra ciggy lighter socket along side the external input jack in the console which would make powering up the Sat Radio real easy. My intention was to at the first early evening stop to install the Visor. Well one day led to the next when we weren’t done driving and seeing the sites until 7:00-7:30 at night, so I didn’t even get a chance to try the install until the sixth night of vacation.

I ran the antenna cable from the trunk through the rear seat backs gap, plugged in the power cord, hooked both into the unit and hit ON. Nothing. OK, maybe the key needs to be in run before the aux power jack is hot. Nope. Dang, did I break the radio in transit? I plugged it into the primary cigarette lighter in the upper center of the dash and sure enough the satellite radio came right on.

So what gave? Was that port broke (blown fuse?) or was it there but not hooked up because the car didn’t have a certain option package? Anyway, I didn’t want to drive around with the wire draping down the middle of the front of the dash and I didn’t want to have to worry about unplugging it every time we stopped where any nefarious individuals would think there was something worth stealing, so in the end I wrapped the Visor unit all back up and stored it the luggage.

I think we ended up playing those 2 CDs four times through (alternately) for the 2 weeks. Each disc holds about 170 songs, so it really didn’t come off as too repetitious.

Thanks anyway Rudy.