Digital Home Thoughts: More Music Than You Can Shake a Stick At

More Variety Than a Quickie Mart
Once you have satellite radio you’ll find yourself amazed at how many new and different songs you hear. My awesome wife and I are constantly saying "wow, we haven’t heard that one in a while!" or "hey, that was pretty good! We’ll have to go check the album out". To help you remember what songs you heard the receiver has a handy memory button. When you press it while a song is playing the SkyFi will store the artist and title information so you can recall it later. For example, below is the memory recall for Gordito Tracks, a very strange but cool Spanish-language song we heard last week.


Figure 7: The memory recall screen

Almost Perfect
While I do love my SkyFi it does have some niggling problems that prevent it from being a truly fantastic radio. For example, the way the channel wheel works isn’t very smart. After a few seconds it automatically selects the channel you stopped on, even if you don’t press the middle enter button. This is very frustrating when you’re just flipping around for something better to listen to. If you don’t find anything you like you have to make sure to scroll all the way back around to your current channel. This is a pain to do while driving, and really is unnecessary since there’s such an easy to hit enter button. A better design would be to revert back to the current station if enter isn’t pressed. In fact, this is how the up/down controls on the remote works!

I also wish that the SkyFi unit had a scan button like on regular radios. It would be nice to have some sort of button that would stop on each station for 5-10 seconds and then move on, so you could hunt around for something different to listen to without having to keep your hands on the receiver controls.

One other issue is that the receiver doesn’t automatically turn on when it detects power from its adapter. Even with it hardwired into the car I have to manually press the power button after I turn my car on. There should be some sort of "always-on" mode available.

Conclusions
After using the SkyFi and XM Radio for three weeks I have no regrets. I love the variety of music that XM Radio offers, and the big display on the SkyFi makes it easy to find something to listen to while driving. Be aware though that the unit is not designed for an in-dash install and that it is quite large when in the car cradle. However, even with the size and lack of a few features, this is a nice receiver that I’d recommend to anyone looking to get started with satellite radio.