SIRIUS had their satellites in the sky one year before XM, but spent a lot of time getting their money side stuff lined up for what they knew would be a long hard road to profitability. XM was first to market for almost a full year before SIRIUS. I was sooo close to getting XM before I found out about SIRIUS, and the commercial-free format and NPR presence sold me. If I was going to pay for it I certainly wasn't paying for commercials! Now XM is going commercial free... hmmm. In any case, XM has fewer satellites with poorer coverage and one is already dying. There's plenty of room for a duopoly in this market though, so I think both will ultimately profit offering two diverse products to an ever media-hungry public.

On the antenna, the cover is plastic so it would stand to reason common weather-resistant plastics would freely pass the signal. Simplistic reasoning yes, but by removing the third brake light and just sliding the antenna into the cavity (if there is one) a simple test can be made. The Audiovox unit has a signal strenth indicator which would be good for the test to see just how good the passivity is. Until the mini-antennas came along I was looking at the OEM antennas from Mercedes and BMW which incorporate not only a SIRIUS antenna (sorry XM folk) but AM/FM as well. The Mercedes antenna looks pretty funky and can be seen on the ML320, and the BMW antenna is the shark-fin looking thing. Both are about $140 from the dealer and would replace our existing antenna utilizing the same mounting hole and cable routing. Ah, the possibilities...