7 ms·

When I was a truck driver, Satellite Radio was practically a necessity. Sure I loaded up my ipod with music, but the selection was too damn limited and I would

When I was a truck driver, Satellite Radio was practically a necessity. Sure I loaded up my ipod with music, but the selection was too damn limited and I would tire of hearing the same songs over & over again. The best case scenario for FM radio (when you would finally find something that you could tolerate) was 1 hour. 1 hour of variety to stave off bordem and try to save your sanity. The effective range of the FM signal bubble was around 75 miles/120km. If you were unlucky 'Seek/Scan' button would be broken on the radio. Most radios in company supplied trucks were very shitty. MY favorite times would be at night and manually adjusting the AM reception and picking up stations from all over the world. Trying to discern their location based on the commercials. Sat. radio offered me consistency. It was wholly replaced once I discovered that audiobooks could be downloaded (and not cumbersome audio-cassettes). Then as the years passed the variety on the stations offered diminished to the point that it seemed like they were playing the same 5-6 over & over again. Mergers happened. Personal audio players got better. I could download enough books to keep me entertained for a month AND have music playlists that saved my sanity. So I cancelled. I STILL miss 'Spa Radio' channel73(?) when I am driving in hectic or tense traffic. That always enhanced my calm.

andrewzah 7y ago
Stuff like soma.fm replaced that for me. There’s nothing like turning on groove salad for a bit. There was a period of time where, after work, some friends and I would get together in one of our university's research labs to solder keyboards. It was always empty by then. We'd put on soma.fm and then get to work. Good times.
- cJ0th 7y ago
  same here. I am gladly donating every year. Today I find hand picked music more valuable than ever.
zabana 7y ago
Stories like this is why I love reading HN comments. Thanks for sharing your experience!
- divbzero 7y ago
  100% agreed. The tech discussion is always interesting, but especially so when informed by our diverse experience.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
I actually find Sirius frustrating for long road trips or commutes; most of the channels repeat their content every 6 or 7 or 8 hours. I often find the same programming on my home journey that was on when I was on the way in. Many news type channels like BBC endlessly repeat every hour. Having a pile of podcasts and audiobooks ready at hand makes long drives on ski trips much more tolerable to me... But I do keep the Sirius subscription around just for NPR and BBC...
- zymhan 7y ago
  I find a streaming radio app to give the best variety of content. You can find any particular public radio show playing live somewhere in the US. And plenty of indie radio options as well.
  - UI_at_80x24 7y ago
    This happened long before "streaming audio" or 'apps' were a real thing. Also I live in Canada and drove in USA & Canada. The roaming charges were astronomical and didn't include data. The situation isn't much better now, but atleast I have USA data coverage upto 1GB. Cellphone plan options in Canada are punitive and oppressive. Getting coverage in USA & Canada is painful. When I was driving in the States, data-usage was measured in kB.
- zippergz 7y ago
  When I'm on long enough trips to start hitting repetition, I change channels periodically. There are a handful I like, so rotating isn't a bad thing. But yes, I do wish each channel had more songs in rotation at any given time.
- hermitdev 7y ago
  I also found Sirius frustrating in the same manner. Except for me, it was my daily commute. I could set the clock by the playlist. I only listened to 2 channels and for some reason, the traffic updates to my car stopped working. When they wanted something like $400 to renew for 1 year, I said fuck off.
murph-almighty 7y ago
I honestly hadn't considered this use case for satellite radio. I used to do 5-6 hour drives through areas with crappy cell service and awful radio (only country, gospel or a sermon). Spotify _helped_ with its download feature so I could play tracks I liked locally, but sadly satellite wasn't an option for me since I was driving an '04 Jeep.
- myself248 7y ago
  > satellite wasn't an option for me since I was driving an '04 Jeep How so? If it had an FM tuner, you can use an inline modulator.
- grahamburger 7y ago
  There are and always were satellite radio options that don't have to be built in to the car. My first satellite radio (Sirius, before they merged) was actually battery powered and portable - I could clip the antenna to my backpack and listen while I walked the dog. (This was before mobile streaming was really a thing.) Like others here are bringing up though, I've found the variety on the music channels to be lacking. These days I get more mileage out of Pandora and a few podcasts. Also a fun little note - if you have a standalone radio with active service, then turn it off and stuff it in a box, cancel the service, and wait a few months or a year before pulling it back out, you'll have free service for the life of the radio. They stop sending the device specific kill codes after a while so it will just keep working.
hypertexthero 7y ago
You might enjoying tuning in to Radio Garden: https://radio.garden/ https://radio.garden/
- subhro 7y ago
  This is extremely cool. Thanks so much for sharing.
- wcarss 7y ago
  this might change my life. thanks!
  - genericacct 7y ago
    Also try radiolise.github.io
- mzgaljic 7y ago
  This is the coolest thing i’ve seen this year! Thanks for sharing.
- codesternews 7y ago
  Wow Thanks!!!
xienze 7y ago
The worst part about Sirius is that the music channels seemingly can’t go more than 2 songs without inane DJ banter that can go on for entirely too long. Thankfully they have sports and talk-oriented channels, but the music part of Sirius is practically unlistenable due to the constant interruptions.
toxican 7y ago
>MY favorite times would be at night and manually adjusting the AM reception and picking up stations from all over the world. Trying to discern their location based on the commercials. I recently got into this as a hobby! Bought a cheap portable shortwave radio and every night this week I've sat outside or near the window to see how far away I could pick stuff up from. So far I've confirmed broadcasts from Romania, South Korea, Cuba, and a few across the US. It's usually just preachers or state propaganda, but just the hunt for new stations is half the fun!
- UI_at_80x24 7y ago
  This actually got me into amateur radio as a hobby. It started when I was young and not tired enough to goto sleep. I had a decades-old transistor radio and would scroll through the dial using the smallest fractions of adjustment and hearing the world open to me. Dark of night, speaker pressed to my ear so my parents wouldn't hear and yell at me. Languages I'd never heard before and had no way of knowing where they were. Magical is the best way I can describe the experience. The world became both small, and vast in the same moment.
reggieband 7y ago
I received a trial of Sirius when I bought my vehicle. My Dad bought a life-time subscription (at a time they were practically giving them away) so I had listened to Sirius a few times when borrowing his car. My impression was they have bought and paid for a particular catalogue of music and they play that catalogue pretty exclusively. That catalogue seemed to have the 4th or 5th most popular songs from a huge list of artists but rarely the top 3. It is a massive catalogue but when you listen to it enough it starts to become repetitive and I would start to wonder "do they even have any other songs by that artists" after hearing a b-side for the third or fourth time. I even considered buying it anyway since I like to go on trips to remote areas (fishing/camping) and can't rely on data for my phone for Spotify. In many rural places there is only a single radio station and even then it may be mostly static. But I found in those locations even Satellite reception was spotty, especially in the mountains or valleys I frequented. Compared to top-40 FM radio, Sirius is amazing. It had its time. But comparing it to the internet with Youtube and Spotify (or Apple Music, etc.) just blows it away.
ericabiz 7y ago
I'm definitely in the minority here, but I cancelled my Spotify subscription in favor of SiriusXM. There were a couple changes they've made recently that made this make sense. One, all their car subscriptions now come with an app version. And two, they have a pretty cool Web UI (https://player.siriusxm.com https://player.siriusxm.com) where you can listen to any channel live or experiment with "Xtra" channels (it's a Pandora integration.) My use case is that I work mostly from home and want something mindless to play in the background while I'm working. Spotify playlists quickly become repetitive. Sirius is "set it and forget it"--I have all the channels and Xtra channels I want in a grid on their website, and I have it up on a second monitor so I can just click on whatever channel I want. I still miss Spotify on occasion, but if I want a specific song or artist I can just go to YouTube and stream it. Having said all this, yesterday and today I've just been streaming long house mixes on YouTube. I wanted something a bit more upbeat than the Chill channel and I've heard all the songs on BPM. But I'm sure I'll be back to Sirius soon. :)
- taurath 7y ago
  If you really want to lock in your long mix/specific moods, check out di.fm. Its all hand curated and the genre's all have a particular mood about them, many of which are just the right amount of vocal/nonvocal to push you through a day. Also just a warning - SiriusXM doesn't just let you leave. They have some of the most aggressive "winback" salespeople in the business, and they will NEVER stop mailing you offers that look like something else, calling you, and emailing you offers once you manage to leave. Their skeevy tactics have put me off the company as a whole forever.
  - ericabiz 7y ago
    Oh, that's wild...I had no idea they still existed. I was a paid subscriber of theirs for many years back in the day. I'll check it out again; thanks!
    - umjames 7y ago
      Also di.fm will play artist's shows (aka podcasts) at certain times on certain channels. It should be under the calendar tab. I have never subscribed to a streaming music service as I would rather purchase a song I like once and own it forever. So di.fm and several dance music artist shows keep new music coming in. I have SiriusXM in the car and had it when it was just XM. I only listen to small number of channels and when I don't want to hear what's on any of them, I have an iPod Touch that I can use over Bluetooth to listen to purchased music, downloaded podcasts, and audiobooks. I really wish Sirius would simulcast di.fm's channels just for the variety that they can't (and don't try to) compete with.
m0zg 7y ago
Why not listen to audiobooks? That's what I did when I had to drive to work. I eventually get bored of music. Audiobooks though are never boring, and there's a near endless supply of them. Where I live you can borrow them from a library as well. You can't listen to audiobooks when e.g. reading code or even coding, but you totally can while driving.
zackmorris 7y ago
While I don't normally condone the use of swearing, I applaud your use of it here. I moved furniture for a few years in my early 20s, and none of the trucks had working air conditioning. That was during a heat wave with 110 F heat, which translates to 120+ at the top of a trailer. The air conditioning should have worked at the very least to prevent a heat-exhaustion death. Some things in life will never change, and those things well and truly are $#!@.
- _jal 7y ago
  One may only swear around you when engaged in traditionally blue-collar careers? I'm pretty sure every engineering department I've ever been in would have a choice word or two.
- xfitm3 7y ago
  Fuck work trucks without a/c in hot climates
Koremat6666 7y ago
The reason why I cancelled SiriusXM was because of lack of diversity. A huge chunk of the channels were the sports channels which I did not care about. Music channels were outright weird and all of them played may be 20 songs again and again. They had zero diversity of music. There are plenty of non-white, non-american born people in North America and yet they did not have any Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi channels.
scarface74 7y ago
In the modern era would streaming over cellular been good enough if you were still a truck driver?

andrewzah 7y ago

Stuff like soma.fm replaced that for me. There’s nothing like turning on groove salad for a bit. There was a period of time where, after work, some friends and I would get together in one of our university's research labs to solder keyboards. It was always empty by then. We'd put on soma.fm and then get to work. Good times.

cJ0th 7y ago
same here. I am gladly donating every year. Today I find hand picked music more valuable than ever.

zabana 7y ago

Stories like this is why I love reading HN comments. Thanks for sharing your experience!

divbzero 7y ago
100% agreed. The tech discussion is always interesting, but especially so when informed by our diverse experience.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

I actually find Sirius frustrating for long road trips or commutes; most of the channels repeat their content every 6 or 7 or 8 hours. I often find the same programming on my home journey that was on when I was on the way in. Many news type channels like BBC endlessly repeat every hour. Having a pile of podcasts and audiobooks ready at hand makes long drives on ski trips much more tolerable to me... But I do keep the Sirius subscription around just for NPR and BBC...

zymhan 7y ago
I find a streaming radio app to give the best variety of content. You can find any particular public radio show playing live somewhere in the US. And plenty of indie radio options as well.
- UI_at_80x24 7y ago
  This happened long before "streaming audio" or 'apps' were a real thing. Also I live in Canada and drove in USA & Canada. The roaming charges were astronomical and didn't include data. The situation isn't much better now, but atleast I have USA data coverage upto 1GB. Cellphone plan options in Canada are punitive and oppressive. Getting coverage in USA & Canada is painful. When I was driving in the States, data-usage was measured in kB.
zippergz 7y ago
When I'm on long enough trips to start hitting repetition, I change channels periodically. There are a handful I like, so rotating isn't a bad thing. But yes, I do wish each channel had more songs in rotation at any given time.
hermitdev 7y ago
I also found Sirius frustrating in the same manner. Except for me, it was my daily commute. I could set the clock by the playlist. I only listened to 2 channels and for some reason, the traffic updates to my car stopped working. When they wanted something like $400 to renew for 1 year, I said fuck off.

murph-almighty 7y ago

I honestly hadn't considered this use case for satellite radio. I used to do 5-6 hour drives through areas with crappy cell service and awful radio (only country, gospel or a sermon). Spotify _helped_ with its download feature so I could play tracks I liked locally, but sadly satellite wasn't an option for me since I was driving an '04 Jeep.

myself248 7y ago
> satellite wasn't an option for me since I was driving an '04 Jeep How so? If it had an FM tuner, you can use an inline modulator.
grahamburger 7y ago
There are and always were satellite radio options that don't have to be built in to the car. My first satellite radio (Sirius, before they merged) was actually battery powered and portable - I could clip the antenna to my backpack and listen while I walked the dog. (This was before mobile streaming was really a thing.) Like others here are bringing up though, I've found the variety on the music channels to be lacking. These days I get more mileage out of Pandora and a few podcasts. Also a fun little note - if you have a standalone radio with active service, then turn it off and stuff it in a box, cancel the service, and wait a few months or a year before pulling it back out, you'll have free service for the life of the radio. They stop sending the device specific kill codes after a while so it will just keep working.

hypertexthero 7y ago

You might enjoying tuning in to Radio Garden: https://radio.garden/ https://radio.garden/

subhro 7y ago
This is extremely cool. Thanks so much for sharing.
wcarss 7y ago
this might change my life. thanks!
- genericacct 7y ago
  Also try radiolise.github.io
mzgaljic 7y ago
This is the coolest thing i’ve seen this year! Thanks for sharing.
codesternews 7y ago
Wow Thanks!!!

xienze 7y ago

The worst part about Sirius is that the music channels seemingly can’t go more than 2 songs without inane DJ banter that can go on for entirely too long. Thankfully they have sports and talk-oriented channels, but the music part of Sirius is practically unlistenable due to the constant interruptions.

toxican 7y ago

>MY favorite times would be at night and manually adjusting the AM reception and picking up stations from all over the world. Trying to discern their location based on the commercials. I recently got into this as a hobby! Bought a cheap portable shortwave radio and every night this week I've sat outside or near the window to see how far away I could pick stuff up from. So far I've confirmed broadcasts from Romania, South Korea, Cuba, and a few across the US. It's usually just preachers or state propaganda, but just the hunt for new stations is half the fun!

UI_at_80x24 7y ago
This actually got me into amateur radio as a hobby. It started when I was young and not tired enough to goto sleep. I had a decades-old transistor radio and would scroll through the dial using the smallest fractions of adjustment and hearing the world open to me. Dark of night, speaker pressed to my ear so my parents wouldn't hear and yell at me. Languages I'd never heard before and had no way of knowing where they were. Magical is the best way I can describe the experience. The world became both small, and vast in the same moment.

reggieband 7y ago

I received a trial of Sirius when I bought my vehicle. My Dad bought a life-time subscription (at a time they were practically giving them away) so I had listened to Sirius a few times when borrowing his car. My impression was they have bought and paid for a particular catalogue of music and they play that catalogue pretty exclusively. That catalogue seemed to have the 4th or 5th most popular songs from a huge list of artists but rarely the top 3. It is a massive catalogue but when you listen to it enough it starts to become repetitive and I would start to wonder "do they even have any other songs by that artists" after hearing a b-side for the third or fourth time. I even considered buying it anyway since I like to go on trips to remote areas (fishing/camping) and can't rely on data for my phone for Spotify. In many rural places there is only a single radio station and even then it may be mostly static. But I found in those locations even Satellite reception was spotty, especially in the mountains or valleys I frequented. Compared to top-40 FM radio, Sirius is amazing. It had its time. But comparing it to the internet with Youtube and Spotify (or Apple Music, etc.) just blows it away.

ericabiz 7y ago

I'm definitely in the minority here, but I cancelled my Spotify subscription in favor of SiriusXM. There were a couple changes they've made recently that made this make sense. One, all their car subscriptions now come with an app version. And two, they have a pretty cool Web UI (https://player.siriusxm.com https://player.siriusxm.com) where you can listen to any channel live or experiment with "Xtra" channels (it's a Pandora integration.) My use case is that I work mostly from home and want something mindless to play in the background while I'm working. Spotify playlists quickly become repetitive. Sirius is "set it and forget it"--I have all the channels and Xtra channels I want in a grid on their website, and I have it up on a second monitor so I can just click on whatever channel I want. I still miss Spotify on occasion, but if I want a specific song or artist I can just go to YouTube and stream it. Having said all this, yesterday and today I've just been streaming long house mixes on YouTube. I wanted something a bit more upbeat than the Chill channel and I've heard all the songs on BPM. But I'm sure I'll be back to Sirius soon. :)

taurath 7y ago
If you really want to lock in your long mix/specific moods, check out di.fm. Its all hand curated and the genre's all have a particular mood about them, many of which are just the right amount of vocal/nonvocal to push you through a day. Also just a warning - SiriusXM doesn't just let you leave. They have some of the most aggressive "winback" salespeople in the business, and they will NEVER stop mailing you offers that look like something else, calling you, and emailing you offers once you manage to leave. Their skeevy tactics have put me off the company as a whole forever.
- ericabiz 7y ago
  Oh, that's wild...I had no idea they still existed. I was a paid subscriber of theirs for many years back in the day. I'll check it out again; thanks!
  - umjames 7y ago
    Also di.fm will play artist's shows (aka podcasts) at certain times on certain channels. It should be under the calendar tab. I have never subscribed to a streaming music service as I would rather purchase a song I like once and own it forever. So di.fm and several dance music artist shows keep new music coming in. I have SiriusXM in the car and had it when it was just XM. I only listen to small number of channels and when I don't want to hear what's on any of them, I have an iPod Touch that I can use over Bluetooth to listen to purchased music, downloaded podcasts, and audiobooks. I really wish Sirius would simulcast di.fm's channels just for the variety that they can't (and don't try to) compete with.

m0zg 7y ago

Why not listen to audiobooks? That's what I did when I had to drive to work. I eventually get bored of music. Audiobooks though are never boring, and there's a near endless supply of them. Where I live you can borrow them from a library as well. You can't listen to audiobooks when e.g. reading code or even coding, but you totally can while driving.

zackmorris 7y ago

While I don't normally condone the use of swearing, I applaud your use of it here. I moved furniture for a few years in my early 20s, and none of the trucks had working air conditioning. That was during a heat wave with 110 F heat, which translates to 120+ at the top of a trailer. The air conditioning should have worked at the very least to prevent a heat-exhaustion death. Some things in life will never change, and those things well and truly are $#!@.

_jal 7y ago
One may only swear around you when engaged in traditionally blue-collar careers? I'm pretty sure every engineering department I've ever been in would have a choice word or two.
xfitm3 7y ago
Fuck work trucks without a/c in hot climates

Koremat6666 7y ago

The reason why I cancelled SiriusXM was because of lack of diversity. A huge chunk of the channels were the sports channels which I did not care about. Music channels were outright weird and all of them played may be 20 songs again and again. They had zero diversity of music. There are plenty of non-white, non-american born people in North America and yet they did not have any Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi channels.

scarface74 7y ago

In the modern era would streaming over cellular been good enough if you were still a truck driver?