YotaTech Forums - View Single Post - XTR8CK Sirius Satellite Plug & Play Radio Receiver and Vehicle Kit

dgold · 12-27-2005, 08:01 AM

Here's my experience with a 3rd gen 4runr:

I had a friend's XM for a little while, which didn't have a transmitter feature. I used a casette adapter in my head unit, with the wire coming out of the cassette 'mouth' and going straight down and tucking into & under the trim bezel. You could only see about an inch of wire, where it ran between the 2 & 3 presets. When I wanted to listen to XM, I'd just hit 'tape'. It worked very well. That would be my first recomendation as it sounded great, was easy, and was relatively stealthy - as long as you have the stock headunit with the cassette deck and don't mind pulling the top of the bezel from the dash just enough to stuff the wires in there.

Then I had to give the XM back to my friend. I just got the Sirius One. I've mounted it to the sun visor and hard-wired the power into the map-light console. I'm using the transmitter feature and it sounds great -- at least as good as a strong FM station. (I don't have sat radio so much for the sound quality, as for the content.)

At first I struggled to get a clear signal though until I tried this... I searched for a frequency where there was no signal on the adjacent frequencies. In Baltimore, it was hard to find three consecutive frequencies with no signal - for the most part, every other frequency had something. I finally found one where the upper frequency had a very weak signal and programmed that into preset #1. It works great. If I were to do a long road trip up to New York or something like that though, I'd probably just use a casette adapter and temporarily let it dangle. If the transmitter should at some point stop working so well, I'll just go back to the cassette method I used with the old XM unit.

Hope it helps.

12-27-2005, 08:01 AM	#2 (permalink)
dgold Registered User Join Date: May 2005 Location: Baltimore, MD Posts: 48	Here's my experience with a 3rd gen 4runr: I had a friend's XM for a little while, which didn't have a transmitter feature. I used a casette adapter in my head unit, with the wire coming out of the cassette 'mouth' and going straight down and tucking into & under the trim bezel. You could only see about an inch of wire, where it ran between the 2 & 3 presets. When I wanted to listen to XM, I'd just hit 'tape'. It worked very well. That would be my first recomendation as it sounded great, was easy, and was relatively stealthy - as long as you have the stock headunit with the cassette deck and don't mind pulling the top of the bezel from the dash just enough to stuff the wires in there. Then I had to give the XM back to my friend. I just got the Sirius One. I've mounted it to the sun visor and hard-wired the power into the map-light console. I'm using the transmitter feature and it sounds great -- at least as good as a strong FM station. (I don't have sat radio so much for the sound quality, as for the content.) At first I struggled to get a clear signal though until I tried this... I searched for a frequency where there was no signal on the adjacent frequencies. In Baltimore, it was hard to find three consecutive frequencies with no signal - for the most part, every other frequency had something. I finally found one where the upper frequency had a very weak signal and programmed that into preset #1. It works great. If I were to do a long road trip up to New York or something like that though, I'd probably just use a casette adapter and temporarily let it dangle. If the transmitter should at some point stop working so well, I'll just go back to the cassette method I used with the old XM unit. Hope it helps.