They may or may not support the competitor's satellites (not sure if you were BSing with that one, but since the bands are so close, I wouldn't be surprised if they could tune to both), but older devices will most certainly NOT be dual-band compatible. Why? Sirius and XM use VERY different codecs, and almost all receivers use hardware chips to decode the data streamed from the satellite into audio. Incompatible codecs = incompatible receivers.
And the only receivers that can receive firmware upgrades are the portables (on the XM side, the Inno, Nexus, and Helix, and on the Sirius side, the S50 and Stiletto family). Older XM units MIGHT be able to download codec updates OTA, but as far as I can tell, that was only used once way back a few months after launch to clean up some bugs in the decode chip - downloading a whole new codec would be a no go.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Libb @ Apr 28th 2008 4:26AM
They may or may not support the competitor's satellites (not sure if you were BSing with that one, but since the bands are so close, I wouldn't be surprised if they could tune to both), but older devices will most certainly NOT be dual-band compatible. Why? Sirius and XM use VERY different codecs, and almost all receivers use hardware chips to decode the data streamed from the satellite into audio. Incompatible codecs = incompatible receivers.
And the only receivers that can receive firmware upgrades are the portables (on the XM side, the Inno, Nexus, and Helix, and on the Sirius side, the S50 and Stiletto family). Older XM units MIGHT be able to download codec updates OTA, but as far as I can tell, that was only used once way back a few months after launch to clean up some bugs in the decode chip - downloading a whole new codec would be a no go.