XM Satellite Radio is experiencing a pretty serious outage; Sat1 (ok, really Sat3, the one operating over the eastern part of the US) is down, taking with it a substantial part of the terrestrial repeater system along with it. However, XM is not down, only a satellite. The western satellite (noted on the radios as Sat2, really Sat4) is operational.

It’s amazing how many people are whining and complaining around the Net about the situation; they expect XM to work flawlessly all the time, and are apparently completely useless to diagnose and repair the problem. Let me tell you what I did this morning when I looked at the radio and saw the “No Signal” warning…

First, I did a quick Google search to find out how to enter the diagnostic screens on the Inno…every XM radio has a set of screens, but each has a different way of getting to them. (Example: on the Roady2, turn the radio off, type 2-0-7 then push in the thumbwheel, and the radio will turn on. Step through the display button until you get to the extra diagnostic screens. On the Inno, it’s a few more button-presses, but still easily available information.) I entered the diagnostic screen one and checked the BER (Bit Error Rate) which is listed per input. Sat 1, Sat 2, and Terr all showed a BER of 100%, meaning the radio was getting no signal from anything.

But instead of assuming the entire system was down, I…went outside. Checking again, the BER of Sat 2 started dropping; depending on the position, I could get a BER of 0%, solid signal. That told me that Sat 1 was dead, Sat two was a live, and I had a problem…see, I can’t receive Sat2 from inside the house, where I can get a solid signal from Sat1.

Again, though, instead of railing against the fates, I went down to the basement, grabbed a spare home antenna (one of the newer, less-powerful ones), stopped at the garage and picked up a ladder, and climbed to the rainspout outside my office window. I attached the antenna to the spouting (actually to a small block of wood connected to the spouting, to raise it above the roofline) using cheap wireties, ran the cable around the screen (thank heavens it’s spring, and I can leave the window open) into the office and to the Inno base unit. BER of 0% on Sat2, so there’ll be no problem hearing The Bob Edwards Show tomorrow morning.

(For completests, I used my old Roady2 diagnostic screens outside to aim the antenna, but I could have taken out the Inno base unit just as easily.)

Ok, I admit it would bite to live in an apartment building downtown and depend on a terrestrial repeater…but still, if people would stop complaining, take a breath, and think things through, they might discover they can actually work around the problem.

And while I’m talking about XM, let me note that every Opie and Anthony fan who unsubscribes from XM (see, they were suspended for being insulting idiots and then publicly revoking their apology for being insulting idiots) simply raises the average intelligence of XM subscribers. So please, feel free to leave. Maybe if you all go away, XM will stop asking me to pay for their childish nonsense. (They used to be a premium channel, but couldn’t gather together enough subscribers willing to pay extra for ‘em, so XM had to raise the rates on everyone to cover that painful fact.)