# Sirius Outage Last Saturday Night?



## johnp292 (Mar 16, 2009)

Saturday night I took a quick trip to the local Home Depot at about 8PM (eastern). I was listening to my Sirius radio on the way over. I was in the store for about 20 minutes, and when I got back in my car the radio wouldn't stop saying "Acquiring Satellites". My first thought was someone had messed with my antenna while I was in the store, but when I got home the antenna was fine. I have car kits in several cars, so I tried another car and got the same message. The drive home lasted about 15 minutes and I had no service the entire time. Sunday everything was normal again.

Anybody else have this experience? Any idea what happenned?


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## mlb (Jul 31, 2008)

Happened to me as well... came back up after about an hour. No idea what the deal was.


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## GlennDio (Jan 19, 2007)

mlb said:


> Happened to me as well... came back up after about an hour. No idea what the deal was.


Same here ...I got some terrestrial signal during the time so I was able to go in and out a little bit .... I have had it since howard got there and this is the first time I ever lost signal


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## hjsiemer (Sep 28, 2006)

Same for me - contacted customer support and they claim it was due to "sunspot" activity...


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## johnp292 (Mar 16, 2009)

Ahhhhhh....yes.....sunspots. I should have known!


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## johnp292 (Mar 16, 2009)

But a quick search of the net reveals we are currently at a historic low for sunspot activity.

From NOAA's Space Weather page....

Space Weather Outlook
18 March - 13 April 2009
Solar activity is expected to be at very low levels.
No proton events are expected at geosynchronous orbit.

I guess we'll really be missing our radio when the "weather" returns!

:uglyhamme


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## mlb (Jul 31, 2008)

It is springtime... there are outages due to positioning of satellites and the sun whether or not there are sun spots or not. That being said, I've never heard of it being an issue at 8PM.


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## cowboy620 (Mar 4, 2009)

i have never had that problem on xm. i've been a subsriber since 2003.
:hurah:


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## djburger (Jan 12, 2007)

I checked in here because I have experienced LOTS of these outages the last few weeks. They seem to happen mid day and during the afternoon. 

I was used to the couple times during the day that the satellites "hand off" to each other (that's the way I understood it) but these are 10 min outages


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## djrobx (Jan 27, 2009)

That happens to me all the time on Sirius. Their satellites are not geo-stationary so your signal quality will vary depending on where the satellites are. Sometimes I have a rock solid signal that never breaks up. At certain times of the day it will cut out just driving near a tree. It drives me absolutely crazy. XM doesn't have this problem. Some say XM's signals are less ideal for getting around buildings and trees, but at least it's consistent, and they've built up a better repeater network to make up for it.


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## shreadvector (Jun 15, 2009)

I have had virtually interruption free reception in my car for years. I said virtually....

The roof of a dense garage will block the signal. i'm west coast, so if I'm driving in a bulding canyon and the building on the east side is tall and very dense I lose signal. Certain large cell phone towers will "jam" the signal (but that seems to have gotten better).

BUT, Wednesday evening and Thursday morning (6/10/09 and 6/11/09) I had problems in the wide open spaces. I got the Acquiring Signal message every few minutes. It got so annoying I looked at my connections (I've got an XTR8CK installed on the windsheild). Nothing loose. It magically got better sometime Thusday morning. Not a drop of signal since.

I was wondering if there was a satellite problem.


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