It's coming from outer space, and it's going to take over your car radio.
At least, that's the plan of two companies who are vying for one of the hottest new broadcasting developments since a guy named Guglielmo Marconi figured out a way to wirelessly send telegraph signals.
It's called satellite radio, and if you think it's complicated, it isn't -- the bottom line is it's a great new option for listening to radio on the road.
The two companies offering satellite radio service, XM and Sirius, each offer more than 100 channels of music, talk, sports and news radio stations that are beamed via upper-atmosphere orbiters into your car (or even your home, for that matter).
You can drive from Baltimore to Seattle and never lose the digital-quality sound of a Frank Sinatra broadcast. You can head cross-country and always be perfectly tuned to that obscure Mandarin Chinese music channel. And if you're into classical music or opera, Mozart or Swan Lake will be only the push of a button away, even on the lonely highways of rural Montana, where a regular picks up nothing but static on the FM band.
"We're on the ground floor of an amazing enterprise," says Martin Goldsmith, a former National Public Radio classical music personality who's crossed over into the satellite realm as a classical DJ for XM. He no longer spends his time spinning vinyl or CDs, but playing music off the giant music-packed hard drives at XM's Washington, D.C., studios.
"It's all about art being helped by technology," he says.
There are pop music stations aplenty on satellite radio, of course, as well as classic rock, half a dozen country stations, a few New Wave channels, and a specialty station for just about any genre you can think of -- African, reggae, heavy metal, Hindi, gospel, bluegrass and disco. And most of them have no commercial interruptions.
So what's the catch? Well, there's always money coming out of your pocket for anything good, and satellite radio is no exception.
On top of a one-time, purchase-and-installation fee for a radio, satellite antenna, and special receiver that will run you anywhere from $300 to $400, XM charges $10 a month for a subscription fee. Sirius, which has the same start-up costs, charges $12.95 a month.
We decided to test the two satellite services out in a head-to-head extraterrestrial showdown to find out not only how they worked but to see if it's worth plopping down all that money. What we found were some basic differences between the services and some practical advice for anyone considering a satellite radio purchase.
