Sirius FM or XM radio of diaster news info?

[Linox]

I have Sirius FM and can switch to XM if its better. Would either work in a huge diaster such as a power grid outage, attack, natural diaster etc? Where are the transmitters comming from? Are there multiple ones spread out or does the radio rely on one area? Just debating if its worth keeping or if it will go down with all the other stations.

 

[BamaScan]

I am afraid to say if it gets real bad both XM and Sirius will go down. If I remember right they do have a few repeaters in some large cities. The repeaters could also go down. A large percent of it is from Space. Asteriods, Nuclear War, EMP, Large Power Outage would all take it out. I remember when Hurricane Katrina was about to hit the US I lost my radio reception for a couple of days. I called up XM and they told me that Hurricane Katrina was blocking my signal. The Satelite like most Satelites including Direct and Dish TV are over Centeral or South America. XM and Sirius are like most everything else today where one radio disc jockey is many states away from you. As far as as a reliable radio during a Major Disaster is Shortwave.

 

[n5ims]

The Satelite like most Satelites including Direct and Dish TV are over Centeral or South America.

Actually the XM Radio, Dish Network and DirecTV satelites are in geostationary orbit (Geostationary orbit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) in the Clark Belt over the equator. To extend coverage, XM Radio has a series of repeater stations in cities where large buildings may block the satelite signal.

The Sirius satelites work differently and use a "Tundra orbit" (Tundra orbit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) where three satelites fly low over north america and quite high over south america (Sirius Satellite Radio - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) so at least one is over north america at any given time. Each satelite spends about 16 hours per day over the US to broadcast the signal to the receivers.

During Katrina and some later hurricanes, Sirius Radio set up a special channel with information for folks that were forced to leave the affected areas. They provided road updates during the evacuation period to let folks know what roads were flowing (and how well) as well as what special conditions (such as contra-flow lanes where folks drove away from the area on all lanes of an interstate and no travel was allowed into the area). During Katrina, they broadcast the signal of WWL-AM (the host site for the group of all New Orleans Radio stations that pooled their resourses to broadcast information from the area) so displaced folks from New Orleans that were sent to area around the country could keep up on what was going on "back home".

 

[N5AMS]

well xm and sirius have mearged so you would get the same channels either way you go

 

[CoolCat]

I have Sirius FM and can switch to XM if its better. Would either work in a huge diaster such as a power grid outage, attack, natural diaster etc? Where are the transmitters comming from? Are there multiple ones spread out or does the radio rely on one area? Just debating if its worth keeping or if it will go down with all the other stations.

I believe XM transmits it's signal to it's satellite repeaters from [or close to] it's headquarters in Washington DC, and Sirius from [or close to] it's headquarters in New York.

I assume they have backup generators to power their transmitters during a power outage, but a natural disaster hitting the area of the transmitters would put them out of service just like any other transmitter site.

 

[n5ims]

I believe XM transmits it's signal to it's satellite repeaters from [or close to] it's headquarters in Washington DC, and Sirius from [or close to] it's headquarters in New York.

I assume they have backup generators to power their transmitters during a power outage, but a natural disaster hitting the area of the transmitters would put them out of service just like any other transmitter site.

While a failure at their transmitter site may put them out of service for a bit, they'll probably do what other network broadcasters do and simply switch over to an alternate site that isn't affected. Since the merger, you'd expect that the XM uplink would now be able to backup the Sirius uplink site and Sirius site backup the one for XM (in addition to whatever arrangement they had prior to the merger).

For example, back in the early days of ESPN they would switch from their Briston CT uplink to a site in Texas or Arizona when a major hurricane was predicted to hit their headquaters. This allowed them to move their dishes into positions that would better ride out the high winds and eliminate issues caused by wind moving the dishes or rain fading their signal. That was when there were few uplink sites and mobile uplinks were on tractor-trailer rigs and took several days to setup for operation. Now there are many uplink sites designed for 24/7 operation and a mobile uplink can be live in about half an hour from arriving on scene.

 

[poltergeisty]

Iridium ftw!