Sirius Satellite Radio does have some great features. It offers more than 125 commercial-free channels, including 65 devoted to music. Plus, you can continue to listen to the same channels no matter where you are – even as you move from city to city and state to state.

Sirius radio is also a sports lovers dream with channels devoted to all major sports with constant sports talk, game broadcasts, news and score updates. For example, Sirius broadcasts all games of all NFL teams, including the playoffs and the Super Bowl. Sirius also broadcasts more than 1,000 NBA games, as many as 40 NHL games per week, college football and bowl games college basketball, and even English Soccer! While Howard Stern is getting the big buzz right, Sirius also has celebrity-anchored channels with Martha Stewart, Jimmy Buffet and Eminem. In short ,whether your interest is the NFL, hip-hop, Christian music, E! Entertainment, or comedy, Sirius has something for you.

What you need to hear Sirius

There are three things you need to get Sirius satellite radio – a subscription, a receiver and an antenna. You can choose a receiver for you car, your home or both. You can find these receivers at just about any electronics retailer such as Best Buy and Circuit City, as well as online at Crutchfield.com, Amazon.com, and TechforLess. The price of these receivers vary all over the place. Some are Sirius ready, meaning that they play through your car radio's CD or cassette player, while others are Sirius portable and can be moved from the car to your home.

A subscription to Sirius currently costs $12.95 per month or about $155 a year.

The downside

There are a few things to consider before buying a Sirius radio. For one thing, it's never local. In other words, you will never hear local weather, local sports updates, local talk radio or local traffic conditions.

Second, you need to consider how much time you spend in your care. If you spend 3 to 4 hours per day driving around, Sirius might be worth the cost. However, if you're in your car only an hour or less a day, you might not want to spend $155 a year to hear commercial-free music, etc.

Finally, there is no guarantee that those commercial-free channels will stay commercial free forever. Sirius continues to lose money as a subscription-based service, and may eventually have to start charging extra for some of its more popular channels.

In the meantime, if you'd like to experience Sirius radio, you can try it free online - just go to http://www.sirius.com and click on Free Online Trial.

If you want digital radio but don't want to pay for it, there's another technology called HD Radio that enables AM and FM radio stations to broadcast their programs digitally. These digital broadcasts provide listeners with radically improved audio quality, more radio channels through multicasting, and new data services. To learn more about this amazing new technology, just go my Web site, http://www.hd-radio-home.com, for complete details.

Douglas Hanna is a retired marketing executive and the author of numerous articles on HD radio, the Internet and family finances.

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