Why I love satellite radio

Last week I found myself sitting alone in my parked car in front of my house for about 15 minutes straight. I wasn't talking on the phone, or working on a project. I was listening, rapt, to an episode of science-fiction show "Dimension X," a radio series that aired a dozen years before I was born.     

My husband and I added satellite radios to our cars just a few months ago, and like people who finally discover cable TV after years of only having network channels, we're never going back. (What's that the Buggles said, in an oddly prescient song? "We can't rewind, we've gone too far.") Satellite radio may not kill the radio star, and it may not reach cable TV's popularity for years to come, but I believe it's the future.

I support my local independent radio station and am a big fan of public broadcasting, but there are times when there's just nothing on the free dial that I feel like listening to. Not to mention those times when you're in the fifth hour of that long, slow, dull drive up the dusty backbone of California, the basketball game has gone to static, you've memorized all your CDs and the local station plays only scratchy country music from 1974.

Not that satellite radio is cheap. But $12 a month equals one movie ticket, or two magazines, or one month of a pay movie channel like Showtime, or three or four fancy coffees. Considering the amount of time I spend in my car, for me the per-hour enjoyment cost works out. 150 channels is one thing, most of them having absolutely no commercials is an added bonus.

Sinatra to ska, jazz to jam bands
Whether you end up with XM or Sirius, you can delight in the world of narrowcasting. It's like the Internet: There are Web sites for everyone from "Star Wars" fans to Hummel collectors, because somewhere there's an audience out there for them.

With satellite radio, you can indulge your guilty-pleasure fascination with Broadway songs, or uncensored rap, or gospel music, ska, Euro hits, right-wing or left-wing politics, bluegrass, electronica, Sinatra, opera, classical, jazz, jam bands ... you name it.  On XM alone, there are at least four stations that specialize in one form or another of alternative music. (Soft alternative? Check. Hard alternative? Got it. 90s and Today Alternative? Sure. Deep Classic Alternative? Not sure what that is, but they've got that too.)

Both major satellite services also allow listeners to take a tour through the ages via decade-specific music stations. Flip from the wartime hits of the 1940s to 1950s rockabilly to 1960s Brit rock to 1970s soft tunes to 1980s pop to 1990s ... whatever 1990s music means to you. I most often switch between the ballady 1940s channel (the music my GI parents imbued me with) to the 1980s hits of my high-school days ("I was on the Paris train, I emerged in London rain"). Unsure exactly what song that is? Satellite radio flashes the name of the song and artist across the screen, so I no longer have to try and remember a scrap of lyric until I can hunt down the singer's name online.

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