Rusted Sky

One thing that really kind of bites as an early adopter of a technology - there's going to be something better come along. It might come along quickly, it might take a while - but come along it will, and it'll have significant improvements that throw the old way into the dust.

Take for example... cable TV. I've got a 1958 Popular Mechanics magazine that laborously goes into the complexities of the newest TV antennas, and what to expect as far as performance from each. Fast forward to 1978 - and in Cheyenne, Wyoming cable TV was very popular... no matter how good the antenna, you're not going to get decent TV signals from 75-100 miles away (Denver or Fort Collins) and if all you've got locally is ONE TV station, you're willing to look at alternatives.

Fast forward to today. Cable TV not only provides a heck of a lot of channels (far more than the 7 channel spread in Cheyenne in '78) it also provides high speed internet (with movies on demand available from NetFlix and other providers, even...) and telephone service.

Such a thing wasn't even dreamed of in 1958, outside of SF magazines.

How about cars? Reading about the vehicles in '58 don't make me long for the good old days - tires that if you're REALLY careful will last almost 40,000 miles? When a man had a bet with his wife that he could get better mileage on a long drive, and got 18 mpg to her 14? When you needed to get your plugs cleaned and gapped quarterly? The car I'm driving gets 20+ mpg in-town, better on the highway, and I expect I'll need the plugs changed at 80 to 100 thousand miles. Progress? I think so.

Computers? I've got from a 2 Mhz Z-80-based computer to the current monster - a dual-core 1.8 Ghz system, with an effective speed of about 3.8 Ghz. (Or thereabouts). I've got a terabyte of storage in it - while the first machine I bought had a whole 90kilobytes of storage on each floppy. The floppy disk is pretty well gone at this point - like the yards-long TV antennas that used to hover over the roofs of suburbia.

But yet without the first samples, and the people willing to buy them, and others willing to try them... we wouldn't have what we've got today. The PC didn't spring forth with gigahertz/terabyte capacity - cars didn't get incredible improvements on reliability and efficiency, cable systems didn't go from offering 7 channels to 200+ without a lot of engineering steps along the way. Change and improvements came incrementally.

And so it was with satellite radio.

I was one of the early adopters for Sirius - if I read my account number correctly, I was in the first 12,000. I LIKED the idea of a whole boatload of channels - and was pretty tired of what passed for entertainment on the AM band. So I picked up a Jensen receiver... and loved it! Clarity of the signal, a wide selection of stuff to listen to - I was pretty sure it was going to be a commercial success... and it's finally gotten to that point. Only took six years or so... but it's difficult to come up with something like satellite radio WITHOUT having the entire infrastructure set up before you start selling subscriptions. First you had to figure out HOW you were going to do it - what sort of signal encoding and compression you'd have, get your satellites designed and launched, your first generation receivers designed and manufactured, repeaters put into cities where signal strength from the satellites would be iffy at best... and we won't even talk about contracts for content and a ground station to control the satellites. You're talking about hundreds of millions, possibly a billion or more, before it can sign up the first subscriber.

The only way it ever came about was due to the '90s tech bubble, and venture capitalists who had a hell of a lot more money than they could figure out what to do with. But there were problems along the way - nothing insurmountable, YOU try designing and building a receiver that can take a whisper-faint 2.4 Ghz signal from a satellite 10k miles out in space, decode it, separate it into 100+ channels, expand the compressed and encrypted channel in near-real time and play it out on your car radio... and try to make it AND the antenna as small as possible, please.

The satellite antenna on my car is the size of my fist. The control unit is about 6 inches long, two inches high, and perhaps an inch deep. It's attached to a 2"x10"x10" box under the front passenger seat. It's worked pretty reliably over the years... until this last week. I've been getting more and more 'Acquiring Signal' messages as the sound cuts out - I figure possibly the micro-coax from the antenna got crimped, or the input section of the receiver's gone deaf. Either way, I'm faced with a dilemma.

Do I pay to get it fixed, or buy a new receiver? I've already had to replace the Audiovox in my wife's car - the replacement from WalMart was $38.

I broke down - and got a replacement Sirius Stratus. This is about the 4th, maybe 5th generation of Sirius hardware.

Size?

That's the Kenwood Remote for my current system on the right. That's the entire receiver on the left. The receiver is indeed smaller than the remote. Time marches on.

Yeah - being an early adopter means sometimes your equipment gets superceded. Sometimes what you adopt fails. But sometimes - you luck out. In the last 5 years I've listened to maybe two hours total of broadcast radio in the car, when I've had a choice of listening to AM/FM or satellite radio.

I don't plan on going back - and have no intention of doing so.

J.