Sirius Music Radio Problem

[pmagrady]

I have been experiencing signal problems over the last few months. I thought my antenna had gone bad, so I bought a new one. That new antenna was no better.

The problem is that I get music for a few minutes and then it cuts out. The Clarion radio display says updating or something like that. Then music comes back for a few minutes. Any ideas. I am about ready to bring my CDs back to the boat.

[DJWILLIAMS]

Do you have a closeup pic of your antenna installation that I can view?

David

[Cuzwecud]

Funny you mentioned that I'm having same problem with my portable Sirius unit that has self contained antenna. I was gonna go back to XM but the two are merging but seems XM always had strong signal when I had it previous.

[pmagrady]

Do you have a closeup pic of your antenna installation that I can view?

David

It's on top of my hard top, so the view of the sky is unobstructed. It's the shakespeare SRA-40. It worked without problems for 2+ years.

[Limbofish]

It's on top of my hard top, so the view of the sky is unobstructed. It's the shakespeare SRA-40. It worked without problems for 2+ years.

I cancelled my Sirius account because of this problem with the disc antenna used in car/boat. Why should they care? Stock is trading at $.38/share.

[pmagrady]

I also had a weather problem crop up after the music issue. I would get a "no signal" indicator on the E120. I now was not able to get either weather or music. The SR100's green light was flashing so I thought that was not the issue. Solution found. I emailed Raymarine. They suggested I hook up another known working antenna to rule out the SR100 as the problem before I send the SR100 back to them. I had a new antenna, so I hooked it up and it worked fine. A friend of mine who rigs electronics said that it's probably the wire. When they run wires through the pipe they can rub enough to destroy the insulation over time. I'll pull a new wire and hook it up in a week or so.

My guess is that the intermittent signal on Sirius music is due to a bad wire also. There is a separate antenna and wire for the music side. I bet that wire is about to fail totally also. I'll run one antenna through the SR100 and hook up an audio cable from that to my stereo. That should solve the music issue too.

[Aficionado]

I got tired of hauling CD's and did not like Sirius and found a simple and effective solution: internet radio through my Blackberry and an inexpensive FM transmitter. I don't know how many internet stations are out there, but I LOVE Pandora.com. You can set up as many stations as you like by genre, artist, song, etc. You can then give individual songs a "thumbs up" and Pandora will play more frequently. Give a song a "thumbs down" and it will never play it again. The only real downside is you must have a phone with internet and preferably unlimited download volume. I have approximately 40 stations and enjoy all the music I love with a minimum of hassles and hauling CD's. May not work for everyone, but works for me!

[mrtiminct]

I had the same problem. Had a Raymarine Tech finally come on board. Apparently it is a bad cable. They ran some very extensive test with some hi-tech equipment. I will let you know when they make a new cable. May be a batch of bad ones.

[pmagrady]

I am embarrassed to report that my issue was the antenna connection to the Sirius receiver. The cable was good, I had just not connected it properly. If you don't hear the pronounced click when you connect the cable to the receiver then its not a good connection