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Comment by compcoffee | Hacker News Reader

>Radio that you never lose reception with

And sadly this isn't even the case. I recently purchased a new car that came with the SiriusXM 3-month trial. We drop reception in the country and in town (among tall buildings). In fact, it drops more often than mobile internet (why doesn't XM have 10s buffer?).

The subscription is also more expensive than Apple Music or Google Play Music and the car comes with Android Auto and CarPlay. How they expect to compete is beyond me. I guess that's why they bought Pandora.

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> why doesn't XM have 10s buffer?

It's odd because some of the first generation Sirius radios touted "DVR" like functionality, which makes it clear that buffering is possible. I would imagine they started to phase out that element of the hardware because of cost (especially since most are bundled with the vehicle)

In the same line of thinking, my navigation apps (Google Maps and Waze) also glitch out when driving through extended length tunnels (under Boston for example). I find this odd given that the app knows my route, and these tunnels are used by millions each year.

I worked on some of those XM radios with the DVR/buffering capability, before the merger.

Really, it was just limited to the amount of storage you had. I think the one I did allowed up to 30 minutes but of course you lost it when you switched channels.

The music is so insanely compressed (the best channels were 32 kbit AAC+) and RAM/Flash is so much cheaper now, it could really be anything you wanted these days.

The satellite signal itself has a bit of time diversity in it (in case one of the birds disappears), like about 1500 mSec worth, as well as terrestrial backup transmitters in most cities (SXM's dirty little secret), so if you really have loss of signal you must be underground for a while.

I lose reception in the forests outside my metro area. Exactly the place I would most want to use it since I have more than a few enjoyable radio stations available to me in the city. When I lose reception on them, I also tend to lose reception on XM. At least enough to be annoying.

Even if it did, that would just delay your signal loss by 10 seconds. It only receives a signal so there's no way it could catch up with what it missed.

A modern service could broadcast music files to your radio and then just schedule those, rather than sending a stream like a FM radio. But that's not how Sirius works now.

Yeah, I got a call from SiriusXM about 60 days after I bought my Accord; Honda gave my contact information and VIN over to them. The person on the phone asked if I liked the 90 day trial and how I'd feel about subscribing.

I told her I never tried it; the car had CarPlay and I plugged in with Spotify right away.

She didn't even bother trying to convince me to use the service. "Oh, yeah, I can see how convenient that is. Let us know if you ever change your mind."

I experience the same thing with Sirius. Going under an overpass means about 2 seconds of audio drop. I don’t know anything about their tech but I always assumed buffering isn’t feasible. I would really hope they’d have implemented it if they could.

There are specific locations where I lose signal extremely consistently. Like the right-turn lane of a road near my office. No bridge, no particularly tall buildings - just a small spot where the radio cuts out every time.

I lose reception every time I drive under a bridge, for a couple of seconds. It does seem odd they can't do better.

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