SiriusXM XEZ1V1 Onyx EZ Satellite Radio with Car Kit - Black | Portable Satellite Radio for Car, Truck & Home | Enjoy Music, Sports & News Anywhere

Well, Amazon shipped me the tuner and vehicle real quick by UPS. I was quite pleased. The first thing I did was call Sirius XM Radio and get them to activate my new tuner with the ID on the bottom of the box. This was a slow process since the guy I was talking to was in India and I'm in the USA...bit of a language barrier and I had to slowly spell words and associate each letter with another word. Not the fastest conversation...I wish I had just activated this online which is possible. Oh, I'm a new customer but was charged an activation fee of $15 on top of the monthly rate of $10. Go figure!Then came time to put this in my car. I figured I'd be done within 15 minutes...not me. I made the mistake of following the included directions. Turns out step 1 should be the last step. Just to get this going takes plugging in all the cables and putting the magnetic cable on the roof. Then look at mounting.Well, when I finally had everything plugged in, it seemed like my tuner wasn't connecting. I was expecting to see something on the screen that indicated that. When connected, you can arrow up past channel 1. I went to my email and got the mail that Sirius sent me which included a link to resend an activation. I did this twice before realizing that the arrow up worked now.My car radio has an AUX IN port and the XM tuner sounds great. The tuner has a port for FM modulating but no modulator or cable for that.Last step is mounting this on a vent or on the dash. I chose to use the included glue mat and stick it on my dash. It has to set up for a couple hours, but I'm hoping it holds. If not, then there is always the included vent connection.There are 3 wires hanging out and they easily tangle. I need to wrap them with cable ties so they don't get pulled. The antenna wire must be 10 feet and I only used half that. The remainder I quickly put under my car mat. Tomorrow I'm gonna wrap that in a twist tie and then put it back under the mat.Something has occurred to me. It's possible to slide the tuner out of it's cradle and easily take it with you. However, the mounted cradle and wires may attract the eyes of a would be thief who thinks there's a navigational unit or mp3 player in the car and smash a window to find what's not there. Would insurance cover that? Looks like I better call the insurance company to get the deductible lowered :)The only real problem I ran into was that the audio cable at first wasn't giving power to the speakers on the right side of my car. I unplugged the wire from the cradle and flipped the wire around so that the piece going into the cradle was now going into the AUX IN port of my car radio. Problem was the same. Then I pulled the connection going into my AUX IN out a little till I heard music on both sides. After the music played for a couple minutes, I pushed the connection back in so it was tight again. The audio stayed good on both sides and hopefully it will stay that way.I bought this to replace another radio. It had a compatible dock and all I had to do was slide this one in the existing dock. I leave them in the car year round and they tend to last about 3-5 years each depending on the weather. This is my third one. Turns out that they want to charge you another $15 to swap unless you say the old one broke and they give you a $12 credit (one time I have recieved twice now) so you still pay another $3 to swap if you already have an account. They do it to keep you on the monthly plan. You could fight for more but I did not.I like the larger display and this is less busy than the previous radio but the blue numbers are very difficult to read. Any other color would have been fine. I am sure they were trying to match colors for many cats but my dash is green. I am also not sure why they insist on making the buttons so small but all three have the same configurations.This dock and my previous dock both work with this radio but the power connector and sat antenna both are different. Rather than rerun all the wiring I just used the old dock. The new one also seems to not work as well as the old one did as it requires a much larger area to stick to the dash. I have it on the ash tray so it is lower and out of the way.Xm recently changed codecs i believe and all of my radios tuned to a deeper base as a result. This one at the default level (and the old one) would clip and distort on talk radio. I turned the gain down a notch to resolve this. Music sounded good still. This happened on my embedded radio at the same time as well where bass was deeper and I had to adjust but i didnt have the distortion or clipping. I should not that I use a tape adaptor and not the fm connection...yes my car is that old.These units are the sometimes freebie radios when you get a new account on XMa website. $50 is pricy for a replacement at normal prices but on a daily special $20 worked well.Wanted to share my experience. My Mazda had Sirrus factory installed and when I bought my Prius I didn't have sat radio so I bought this. In my arm rest console I was able to plug in the very large power adapter and auxiliary cable. I then hid the wires under my car seat and ran the antenna wire along my car door and up to my dash. The magnetic antenna sits on top of my dash and I plan to put a piece of Velcro to keep it from sliding around.I called Sirrus xm and was able to transfer my Sirrus account but I had to change to Xm and pay a $15 transfer fee. I was fine with that bc in my opinion XM has better channels anyways.Other reviewers say they don't like that it loses signal when going under bridges or in the garage. I can tell you I lost signal with my factory installed radio in my Mazda going under bridges for a few seconds. So when that happens now, I know that is just expected. I've had it one month now and it works great.I've deducted one star just because the buttons are ridiculously small. Luckily I'm a woman with smaller hands -not sure a man could change the buttons very easily. Also a remote would be nice or have an up or down arrow, like my car radio, so I can go through my programmed channels without having to actually push buttons 1-10. Overall it gets the stations I want very clearly and it's reliable. And the price is cheaper than the chain stores. I would purchase again.Excellent satellite radio receiver for the price. I really like the bigger screen and buttons as a pose to my older system. Looks just as nice as the expensive $90+ ones but it works flawlessly and looks great on my dash. Would definetely buy another for my home.Didn't purchase from Amazon but got same item from Sirius XM, on promotion. The radio with car kit is excellent product I use it in an older car without factory XM reception.To bad the home adapter is not in the kitGoodit said Sirius xm but it is only an xm radio and cant get Sirius howard stern channels, useless for me never should have bought this unit,heading was a lie very unhappy and cant use this