Home > Consumer Reviews > XMDirect XMD1000 Satellite Radio Universal Tuner Box

I bought two XM car radios recently, the Audiovox for our 2006 Subaru and the Delphi for our second car, a 96 Saturn. Both of these use the TERK 1000 tuner. In both cases, we were frustrated with slow tuning (it often took 10 minutes to get a strong signal) and the fact that the radios often lost their preset stations.

Also, with the Audiovox, although this is probably a receiver issue, you cannot listen to AM radio as XM uses so much of that frequency that it obliterates it. This was not explained to me by the installer. This is not good, as I live in the NYC area, and need those AM traffic reports, and, if no one minds, there are some AM shows that I like to listen to. While they have local traffic on XM, they seem to only update the reports every hour or so, and they are not nearly as good as the AM stations. And the FM reception is hurt, too, as XM works through some of that frequency as well, and unless you turn off the XM receiver, the FM stations are distorted with static. I spend more time pushing buttons fooling around with trying to get good XM reception than I do watching the road. Not good. I now have a small battery FM/AM radio in the car. For $300 for the parts and installation, who needs this aggravation?

When I took the cars in to the installer's shop, assuming that there was something wrong with the installations, he told me that there have been lots of complaints and problems related to the TERK 1000. Even in his car, he loses presets and has problems with getting a strong signal. He said that there might be an update to the TERK that fixes these problems, but I think that this was hot air because he would be carrying it instead. Let's not get into Audiovox and TERK selling lousy products.

If you are considering satellite radio, check out the reviews for the competing Sirius and XM receivers. I have an XM subscription and am loathe to change to Sirius. However, if I were starting from scratch, I would buy Sirius because there are too many problems with the XM hardware products.

A lot of people seem to be complaining about what their head unit manufacturers and installers managed to do with this thing, that's not an issue for the receiver itself.

Basically you need this, which is the receiver and the antenna, then you need an adapter to connect it to a head unit, and finally you need a suitable head unit.

The receiver works fine, the audio quality is OK and 95% of the time it just does its job. Once in a while it fails to start and you have to reset it by switching the car off and on again. But once on it always continues to function well.

Now the bit that this unit isn't responsible for...

I use this with a 2006 Alpine head unit along with the appropriate adapter, you switch it on and it works, you tune it and you get a different channel. You can display any of the track information, though not the stock quotes and all that garbage. But then you shouldn't be reading the display on your radio while driving!

The Alpine head unit uses a AInet connection to the adapter which allows chaining to other Alpine compatible units, like their CD changer, but it also has a direct connection to an iPod. So I get iPod, XM, terrestrial radio, CD and CD changer all in one neat package.

Installed in my car and does not have any issue with it. Highly recommended.

Seems there are several people who are having problems related to either their install, or their head units and NOT the tuner itself. The XMD1000 works exactly like its supposed to. I use it with a Pioneer CD head unit and i get 3 banks of XM channels (XM1, XM2, XM3) and i can see artist, song title, channel name and number, etc. displayed on my head unit screen. I've owned my XMD1000 for almost 3 years in 2 different cars and it never once lost channel programming. If your XMD1000 tuner takes up the Auxillary port or somehow miraculously interferes with AM AND FM, then you should get a different head unit as this is not any problem with the XM tuner. My Pioneer head unit has a specific connection for the XM tuner and it's not possible for XM to interfere with AM or FM in any way at all.

This tuner was very easy to self-install, works perfectly and has no major problems.

It has worked great in my Dodge Truck withe the factory head unit.

I wish everything in life worked as well.