SALEM, Ore. (CNN/Money) – On a recent morning, my husband and I drove three hours through the mountains, in a snowstorm, with two-year-old twins, a carsick puppy and no cell phone service.
We hit a deer, ran out of coffee and were both late for work.
Yet the soothing voice of a BBC World News anchor in London didn't falter, the morning news on CNN was crystal clear, and Vanilla Ice offered comic relief when no vanilla ice lattes were in sight.
Satellite radio is a wonderful thing.
Unlike regular radio, which typically travels no more than 50 miles from its source, satellite radio goes most anywhere you go – with the exception of tunnels, parking structures and other obstructions.
It also lets you listen to virtually anything you want to hear.
Two companies -- XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio -- are competing head to head for new subscribers, each offering more than 60 commercial-free music stations, plus dozens of news, talk, sports, entertainment and traffic stations.
At about $10 to $13 a month, satellite radio is worth the price if you log hours in the car, drive in rural places, spend a small fortune on CDs or, in my case, all of the above.
Easy to install
The easiest and least expensive way to get satellite radio in your car is with a "plug and play" device made to work with either XM or Sirius. (XM receivers don't work with Sirius service and vice versa.)
I tried the XM Delphi Roady2 and Sirius Sportster, which are among dozens of models available. Each cost about $130 at my local Best Buy and took about half an hour to install.
The PDA-sized devices receive satellite signals via a small magnetic antenna you attach to the roof of your car. It then transmits signals to your existing car stereo via a handful of FM stations.
Both the Roady2 and the Sportster let you search for stations by category (i.e. news, talk, rock, dance), scroll through a menu by station, program or artist and program your favorites to memory.
I liked the sleek look of the Roady2, but found the slightly larger Sportster easier to use while driving. I also liked having its remote while backseat driving.
No static here
The route I chose to test XM and Sirius is more than a hundred miles on a windy, tree-lined road through Oregon's Cascade mountains. There is virtually no radio available and cell phone coverage is spotty. I plugged in XM radio for my trip east and turned on Sirius for the way back.
Service for XM and Sirius was consistently good, but Sirius was slightly better in the places where XM had faded. This could be because Sirius satellites orbit at a higher angle than XM satellites, I'm told. It could also be that we put the Sirius antenna in a slightly better spot on our roof than the XM antenna.
Although the Sirius and XM Web sites suggest that one or the other has superior programming, it would take me more than one road trip to determine whether XM's all-80s station was better than the Sirius' all-80s station.
Both services offer nearly every genre of music, and both offer some of the same news stations, including CNN, Fox News and BBC World News.
Football fans and Elvis fans may get more out of Sirius, which has a dedicated NFL station and an all-Elvis station. Baseball and NASCAR fans may get more out of XM, which has a dedicated NASCAR station and, starting in 2005, Major League Baseball.
At first glance, XM scored points with me for its "Unsigned" station, which is nothing but unsigned artists. Sirius scored points with my husband for having two NPR stations.
To his disappointment, and my relief, neither company has a station dedicated to Irish music. Yet.
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