Well, after hunting around on eBay for a few days looking for the XMDirect2 with the Alpine cable for the CDA-9855, I finally found it as a bundle for $80. I bought it instantly since other places wanted well over $150. After a week in shipment, it arrived and I promptly installed it.

It comes with:

- Sound quality.

- Conversion box for your head unit of choice. In my case, Alpine 9855.
- USB Programmer Cable to tell the conversion box what head unit you are connecting it to.
- XM Antenna.
- XM Mini Tuner.
- Bad instructions.

I'll work my way backwards and start off with the instructions. The instructions are very vague if you have never hooked up any car audio devices before. Fortunately I do this almost weekly for people and myself so I had some experience under my belt, but none with XM itself. For instance, they do not tell you in the instructions that the yellow wire with the fuse is the constant power wire and the black wire is the ground. From my experience and a little comon sense, I figured this out right away, but i can see why people get this installed by a "professional"... and let's leave circuit city out of this... Everything is basically plug and play. If you are using FireFox as your webbrowser, scratch that. The programmer is web based through IE and will not program the unit through FireFox, unless you can get ActiveX working. An alternative is to find the XM folder on your hdd and run the USB programmer file there and manually navigate to your head unit firmware file (which I did because I didn't want to open IE).

XM Mini Tuner is great. It pops into it's little docking station which is about 3" x 2" at the max. I hid that away under the center console, but easy to get at if i get a home dock in the future.

XM Antenna could have been a better design. It has a wire (and they actually give you enough wire to run the antenna all the way to trunk/roof with a lot of extra wire to spare!). The only thing that would have made this better would be that the antenna could have been wireless so for one I would not have to drill a hole to hide the wire, or 2 being able to see the wire. I mounted the antenna on the trunk. It had a built in powerful magent that holds on very tight. It suggests to have the antenna away from glass/sunroof about 4", although I didn't have any issues mounting it right beside the glass rear window on the trunk. It never fades out and signal is fully clear.

Again the conversion box and the XM Mini tuner hide away nicely under my center console. This is installed in a '97 Neon. No complaints there. Could even put it in the glove box I guess.

Sound quality is really good. It's near CD quality and some stations I cannot even tell the difference from a CD. Stations like The City or BPM are great. Other stations such as the comedy channels are a lower quality (mostly just talking), same with news like CNN. But it's clear and tollerable. The bass response is very good, the highs are very good as well but if you have a stock audio system you may be losing a lot of the sound since most stock audio systems cannot produce the same frequencies. Im running CDA-9855, Alpine Type S 600c components and a Mach 5 Audio 12" sub in a ported enclosure in active/3-way mode. I had to do a bit of tweaking but it sounds great!

Activation took about 15 minutes. You leave your XM tuned to channel 1 while it receives the activation code. After 10=15 minutes you can try and tuned to channels 7 and 175 I believe. If they both work then it's up and running.

The price of the service, I think, is a bit over priced. I paid for it anyways but it does hurt the bank a bit. After activation fees, etc. and set up on a 1 year subscription, it came to around $200. Really isn't that bad I guess. You get free online XM which works great and I listen to it all the time.

All in all is it worth it? I would say wait until XM and Sirius merge, then we can see if there is anything better to come of it. If you're tired of burning CDs and you want to listen to the top songs, unsensored, etc. then yeah, go for it, you will not be let down.

I'm happy with it though, no real complaints except the bad instructions. I also did not get a confirmation e-mail after I signed up for the service. I logged back into my account and I see my e-mail is correct so I do not know what happened.

I'd give it 7.5/10 if I had to rate it. I activated online so there was no need to call. I suggest doing this since it's quick and simple.

Well I just recently bought a new vehicle with built-in XM radio. It came with a free 3-month trial subscription, and I expect I will keep it. Sound quality is much better than FM. I'd say it's about CD-equivalent. Reception is great. It rarely cuts out, and even then only for about a second. There's no censoring, and no commercials. Is it worth it? Totally.

As for the merger, it's not guaranteed yet because it still has to be approved by the FCC. Both companies guarantee that the merger will not cause any radios to become obsolete. It's not completely clear how this will affect the programming yet. The combined company will continue to operate two separate services for at least 15 years, but apparently the exclusive content will be available on both services. I hope they try to make the stations pretty much the same across both services.

I've heard good things about satellite radio and have always been interested in trying it out. However, I've been leary about picking a provider with the proposed/impending merger.

Plus, my wife & I just moved and now my commute work's been cut in half! Therefore, I have less of a need these day and currently occupy that time with audiobooks that I freely rent from the library.

Besides, I have hard time justifying the cost of such service, but the online aspect is certainly an added benefit. Didn't learn about that until a few months ago. I would definitely tap into that while at work!

So, maybe someday, but not right now. Thanks for the review though Scott and your comments as well Chug.

No problem!

Lack of censorship, and commercials was a big selling point for me with satellite radio. I've had Sirius for a few years, and Scott's right (after two self installed radios) the instructions suck.

Sirius doesn't require any hardware for the in home/office connection you can just log into their website and stream any station.

Same with XM, it just streams from the website. I was talking about hooking it up to an actual stereo system, I suppose you could do that with some audio cable from your computer anyways haha.

Yepper works just fine that way.

Does anyone know if there are any standalone programs for XM, so I don't have to use the site?

Thanks!

Found it!! UniXM for Linux. Comes with source code to compile on any Linux distro. Make it with qmake then make. Works excellent. Connects to the stream and plays it through either Mplayer or VLC.

http://users.eastlink.ca/~iexbeta/unixm.png