Home > Consumer Reviews > Delphi XM Roady XT Satellite Radio Receiver

You've read the hype, here are the facts from someone who has been through it.

1) To work well the unit must be installed in your car. Not placed in your car, installed. The antenna, which comes with a very long wire, must be outside the car, on the roof ideally. Otherwise you will not get good reception. That means either doing a serious installation effort yourself (think: pulling the dashboard off) or paying someone to do it. Otherwise you'll have a lot of wires and a loose radio to deal with. Putting the antenna outside the car advertises what is inside the car, so don't bother hiding the radio when you leave the car because you can't hide the antenna: everyone knows it's worth the effort to break into your car.
2) Regardless of where you put the antenna, in some cases you will not get good reception anyway. If you live in a city, even one with ground repeaters, expect a good deal of static and to miss portions of songs.
3) If you, like me, consider "ads" to be any interruption to what you are trying to listen to, then XM is far from "ad free". The music channels have frequent "You are listening to Fred, XM radio channel 20" type interruptions. All non-music channels have "ads", both in the form of promotions like the ones on the music channels, and real ads for products.
4) Don't believe the channel lineup you see on the XM website. It doesn't exist. For example, they show sports channels covering the 140s, but in reality the only two you get are 142 and 146. The others never appear.
5) Cancelling is a real bummer, so sign up for the monthly payment plan (if you want try it out for yourself), and, if you decide to keep it, only then go for the longer term deals.
6) Cancelling takes about an hour of phone time. They transfer you from person to person, across static filled lines that make conversations difficult or impossible (I had to call back because there was so much static he couldn't understand me at one point). You can't do it from the web, and it doesn't tell you anywhere on their site how to do it. You have to call the Customer Service number and be persistent.
7) The FM radio transmitter built into the Roady XT is worthless when on a long drive. Whatever station you tuned into in your car radio that didn't have signal where you were will suddenly get signal as you drive, and then you'll have to retune your radio and reset the Roady XT frequency to match. Then drive a little further, and do it again. On a 2 hour drive I had to do this maybe a dozen times: not a safe thing to do while the vehicle is in motion, given the difficulty in manipulating the tiny Roady XT buttons and how hard it is to read the screen during the daytime.
8) With that background, I tried several XM radios, and the the Roady XT worked as well as any of them except for the following problems where it performed particularly poorly:
* The buttons are small and unlit, making it difficult to change channels when the ads come on; it is quite hard to hit the station change buttons with any confidence
* The buttons also don't reliably click, so you can hit it several times and still not change the channel
* The display is very hard to read in the daytime
* Setting the channel buttons is annoying, because it doesn't work like every other car radio ever made. You tune into the channel you want to save, and then have to remember to hit the Select button before you hit the button you want to assign to that station. Failure to do so will require you to find the station all over again.
* Tuning is slow. There are a lot of channels spread between 1 and 250 or so, and it takes time to scan between them. There is no way to jump to channel 200 from 100 without going through all the ones in between, one click at a time.
* They advertise that you can select the color of the screen, which is true, if you are very good at differentiating light blue from slightly greenish light blue from slightly grayish light blue, etc.

I cancelled the service and gave the Roady XT away. It wasn't worth $12 a month, even after investing $50 in the Roady and paying the Activation Fee. Overall, this is an exciting technology let down by implementation flaws. If you don't care if you get what you are told you will get for your money, go for this now. Otherwise, I suggest waiting until they get more satellites in the sky and more ground repeaters (they only have about 1000 right now, they need a LOT more) and actually offer the ad-free services they claim. Overall, the technology is promising, but this implementation is not ready for prime time.

I had read this earlier on posts regarding XM's billing practices but thought it was just that person's problem or misunderstanding. Unfortunatley, I was wrong.

When you sign up for XM online you give over your credit card # which is then in their greedy little paws. After trying one of their radios for a few weeks I decided there were some good features but nothing worth keeping. I returned the radio to an area big box store w/o any issues.

I had only paid for a 30 day subscription with my credit card but they continued to bill me.

Links on the web site for unsubscribing lead to another page of links w/o telling you how to unsubscribe! When I called to find out why they were continuing to bill me one representative gave me a runaround saying that even though they could cease billing me they had to bill me as the radio had still been running (this is well over a month after returning it)!. Eventually they agreed to a partial refund even though I do not trust them to not bill again.

For those who might say this is not about the equipment listed on Amazon, I believe it's impossible with satellite radio to unlink the radio programming or the billing issues from the equipment. This is not Amazon's fault, but I think consumers need to be warned.

If you must try XM, I would highly recommend using a credit card that you add money to for any individual purchases not your usual purchases. I do not, however, think they're a very honest company.

The product was delivered as soon as I expected it and it appears to be in excellent condition. I am well satisfied.

Unit hasn't worked since it was bought. If you want to return it, be prepared to suffer. You'll have to call their returns department (no information on returns online-SURPRISE!). They'll have you in queue for 45 minutes THEN tell you that you need the ID number from the unit. Complain to the service representative and be prepared to be abused. They have the MEANEST customer service agents I've ever talked to. DON'T SUPPORT THIS COMPANY BY BUYING THIS PRODUCT!

I bought this unit to use with a boombox and it functioned well but after a few minutes it just went blank. I tried batteries in the boombox, AC power and two boomboxes because they thought the boombox was the problem

But after two boomboxes I guess the problem is the Roady.

Anyone else have this problem?

I use the XM only at home with the boombox.

Currently waiting for response from Crutchfield and Delphi.

I will post again when (if) this is resolved.