We got a letter in the mail a couple of weeks ago to let us know that there was another 2 week free trial of XM Satellite Radio coming up. Cool, I thought, that would give us something different to listen to in the Purple Whale on the weekend trip to Florida. The Friday before Labor Day on the way to work I punched the button marked XM and turned it to my favorite (and really only) station, #31 – The Coffee House, and got a few seconds of song, a few seconds of static, song, static, song. I punched the AUX button to go back to the USB drive.
In the past we have had issues with reception around home because of the copious tree cover, so I figured we’d try it again once we started the trip and got out into the farm land near Barnwell. Well, it wasn’t any better out there, so I went back to the recorded stream of Radio Paradise. I tried it one more time along flatland I-95 and this time it never even locked on the station, the display just showed “LOADING” for a a minute. Then I just gave up on it.
I don’t know where the problem was, my end or theirs, but where ever it was, getting 14 days of one channel of satellite radio was not reward enough to call anyone.