I'm listening to the roast now through my "improvised means" due to no office signal.. yeah, Benjy really blowed. It isn't as funny as I thought'd it be. At this point, I'm in the middle of Andy's song... and the guy's definitely on something. Really weird.
[quote name='Maklershed']I hear that. I work in Harrisburg, PA and my radio worked perfectly in my office and then apparently close to a year ago it was discovered sirius was illegaly using a transmitter tower in this area to broadcast their signal and it was taken down. So now I cant get reception in my office anymore despite the fact that I sit at a window that points west. So now I have to dl the show and put it on a data traveler and bring it to work. Its a pain but its better than no show at all. I cant imagine how I'm gonna survive the work days in four years from now when I've got no Stern to listen to.[/QUOTE]
I read somewhere about the whole terrestrial repeater thing and XM/Sirius being allowed to keep the repeaters until 08 or something. The problem with the terrestrial repeaters is that terrestrial radio sees it as a threat to local advertising revenue since it is basically an FM transmission in a market-by-market scenario. If satellite could begin transmission and offer programming on a regional/local level, they could suck away terrestrial radio advertising revenue on the local level (through buying out local stations to use for terrestrial repeating on a larger scale). Although it's likely that'll never happen, the big companies like Clearchannel are scared shitless of satellite. It's also another reason they're fighting the merger so hard.
So basically.. all of us could get signal, if the terrestrial mega-radio companies wouldn't be so protectionist and getting the FCC to hound them. Sirius gives me entertaining content to listen to, and I think being free of uber-conservative regulation is a large reason for it. I think that maybe the merger will allow them to use the combined satellites to have different orbit paths to further saturate signal.. or better yet, bring them into lower orbit than they are now to allow for greater signal. XM is much more reliant on repeaters than Sirius (and thus has many more), so who knows.. if they can get away with using the repeaters, the combined resources post-merger may end up with everybody being able to finally get some damned signal (especially when you keep in mind that you have to pay more per month to get a higher bitrate through online streaming and more channels).