Sirius Satellite Radio
Posted by Doug Fri, 02 Jan 2004 18:35:00 GMT
Another title for this entry might be, “Why I’m not a professional mechanic.” Saying that tempts me to go on a tangent here to say that I’ve had fantasies about becoming a mechanic. It’s a detail oriented job (just like programming), but one that seems free of the politics and crappiola like the tech industry. You go to work, fix cars, go home. Other people don’t actually understand the details of what you do, but they do have an appreciation. Anyway, it seems like being a mechanic would be a good “downshift” from being a programmer. Odds are though that I don’t have any idea what it’s really like to be a mechanic and would be just as unsettled there as with programming. Stay with the devil you know. So I bought my wife a Panasonic CQ-DP383U CD/MP3 Radio that is Sirius-ready. Crutchfield threw in a free CR-SRT100 Sirius satellite tuner since I bought the antenna. If you’re a regular reader you’ll know I’ve already talked about installing it all. Overall I was happy with my installation. Except it didn’t really work. It seemed like it worked. I was able to listen to the radio and CDs. With the extra antenna adapter that I didn’t get from Crutchfield I was able to actually listen to satellite radio too. After I installed the radio I went to Clevelent for a week. When I got home, Carla complained that the Sirius radio would “take a while to warm up”. Of course, it should either work or not work; there is no “warming up”. The next day we left for South Carolina. Sure enough, it wouldn’t come on. We drove all the way across Cincinnati and into Kentucky with no Sirius radio. We finally gave up and switched to CDs. At some point along the way it just started working again. I chalked it up to the car audio version of PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard). When we stopped the car and then started it back up we lost satellite radio. During our trip to Columbia, SC to see the lights at the zoo we had satellite radio again. On the trip home we had it for most of South Carolina, but lost it in the mountains of Tennessee and never got it back even when we got home. So we had intermitten satellite radio. I chalked it up to extremely poor coverage and was more than a little frustrated by it. Oh another data point: my car battery was dead three times after I installed the radio until I got home. Each time I thought I had a good excuse for why it was dead. The last time nothing untoward was happening. So, either my car radio installation is bad, my battery is bad, or the radio itself is bad. Out of those three I’ll choose the last. The radio must be bad. Crutchfield tech support agreed and said they would swap out the satellite tuner except they were all sold out of them and wouldn’t be getting any more. They said Panasonic should swap it out. I called Panasonic and they chose to believe the installation was bad. They wanted me to take it an “Authorized Dealer”. Of course that meant money out of my pocket for a professional to verify my installation was OK; which I was sure it was. I called Crutchfield and complained. They in turn called Panasonic and got them to do the equipment swap. Panasonic called me and said to do the swap they needed the serial number off the bottom of the tuner which was mounted under the front passenger seat. Meanwhile, I had unplugged the cable adapter from the tuner (because I could reach that) so that the “bad” tuner wouldn’t continue to drain my battery any more. Then Carla came in to tell me the battery was dead on the Durango again. Oops. That meant it wasn’t the tuner that was bad. It either has to be my battery or my installation job. So, I redid the installtion. Originally the tuner only suppled about 6” of 20 AWG cable for the power and ground. The only cable I had laying around the garage when I did the installation was some spare garage door obstruction detection cable. It’s like 22 AWG. I bought some 18 AWG wire and redid the power cable. Instead of just twist-tieing all the wires and taping them, I bought some nice crimps and re-did all my wire connections. Except for the power to the tuner. I soldered that. I also moved the ground connection for both the radio head unit and the satellite tuner to better ground connections. Did it work? Yes and no. First, my batter was dead yesterday when I did all this work. I managed to get it to start and I drove it to the local Autozone to buy all my stuff. While there I had them check my battery. Unfortunately it was too weakly charged for them to check it properly. The guy there noticed how corroded my connector was and told me to clean that up good and then charge the battery. So, I did that. I cleaned it really well. I even got out my dremel to brush off the caked on corrosion. I had enough charge on the battery to test my radio re-installation. It all worked. I backed the truck out of the garage enough so that the antenna stuck out and listened to the satellite radio. The bad news is that after about 20 minutes of listening to the satellite radio it quit working. I got the dreaded “Linking” message on the head unit which means the tunner can’t find the satellite. My understanding is that Sirius doesn’t use geosynchronous satellites. Instead they use “3 figure eights is great”. That means orbiting satellites. I’m assuming the satellite I was listening to went over the North horizon and I could continue to pick it up because I was parked too close to my house. I started to back out more to try and get better line-of-sight, but my batter was dead again at this point. My battery is still dead and taking forever to charge. I still don’t know if my re-installation is good enough to not drain the battery or if my battery itself is bad. I’ll keep you posted. The good news though is that I was able to listen to Sirius satellite radio again for a bit. I suppose if I had used a local installer to put all this in I’d have a single place to take this back to get it working. Oh, well. I’ll keep plugging away on it.
