My Mom won a Sirius satellite radio receiver with a free 3 month subscription. My parents didn’t want it and I wasn’t eager to start paying for radio either, but it seemed like a fun thing to try for free, so they agreed to send it to me to try. It arrived on Monday and I set it up.

The model in the box was the Sirius Sportster. Unless this is built into your car, the setup is going to be pretty clunky. There’s the receiver which you plug into a dock, which you mount to the dash which you plug into wires that lead to an antenna puck and the cigarette lighter for power. Now if I want to charge my cell phone or something, I can’t listen to the radio. The receiver has a built in FM transmitter, so I found an empty channel (not easy to do here) and heard it start to play.

I was expecting that the sound quality would be really great digital quailty. Instead it sounded like a low-bitrate MP3 – all swishy on the high frequencies. FM is not as full-sounding, but at least it doesn’t sound distorted.

I also expected there would be hundreds of channels to choose from, but there’s only 65 and of those only a few interested me. Heck, I can get nearly that many over FM now, even if half of them are talk radio in Spanish.

The receiver itself was easy enough to navigate and change settings. 20 presets would useful if I could find that many stations I liked. They have NFL, NBA and NHL coverage, but no MLB. It would killer if I could listen to Red Sox games, but I guess not today; XM’s got that.

On my way home I stopped at a light underneath a tree and I lost the signal. What’s with that? My old analog radio doesn’t have that problem. Well, it does have that problem under long bridges, but so would satellite radio. I’m not the ideal satellite radio customer anyway – my daily commute is only about 7 minutes long.

Maybe this would be a great thing for long-haul truckers who are always looking for a decent station, but I can’t see myself keeping it past the 3 month trial at $12.95 per month. The future is in customized radio folks, not just more of the same old channels. Forget the expensive satellites, give me WiFi in my car and let me listen to my LAUNCHcast station or whatever else I want on the net. I can already get a decent net connection using my Treo as a modem. Those networks are only going to get better. Proprietary networks such as satellite have no chance once the Internet goes completely portable. Siriusly.