My Prius Prime Advanced is the third car I’ve owned that receives a satellite signal and it is by far the worst. It seems that any tree or passing truck bumps the signal. Has this been others experience? Or maybe there is something funky with my system.
It is fairly reliable on my Premium but will drop out when a solid line of tall fur trees is between me and the south. According to the spec for the satellite signal, there is about a 4 second buffer in the radio and it is receiving from two different satellites and possibly a terrestrial receiver. If you are getting drop outs from a tree or a fast passing truck, I would think you have some problem with your system. The Sirius signal is separated into three carriers, one each for the two satellites, and the third for the terrestrial repeater network where available. Sirius receivers decode all three 4 MHz carrier signals at once to achieve signal diversity. This is in contrast to XM which uses six carriers and decodes three 2 MHz carriers to economize on receiver power consumption and complexity at the cost of channel-changing speed. There is an intentional four-second delay between the two satellite carrier signals. This enables the receiver to maintain a large buffer of the audio stream, which, along with forward error correction, helps keep the audio playing in the event that the signal is temporarily lost, such as when driving under an overpass or otherwise losing line-of-sight of any of the satellites or ground repeater stations. A third, separate signal is uplinked to the AMC-6 Ku-band satellite and received by 36-inch (910 mm) satellite dishes for the ground repeater network. This third signal is broadcast on a third segment of the signal. From: Sirius Satellite Radio - Wikipedia
Can't say I've had too much trouble but yeah it does cut out like every other satellite radio I've used. Not sure what you're experiencing, if it is just cutting out more than other cars you've had or if it is cutting out way way more. If it is the latter than there might be something wrong, bad connection to the nav/radio unit, bad antenna or something along those lines.
I've had it cut out for a second or two a few times, but that's the rare exception. Every time it's done that, I've been in rural/wooded areas vs. city/suburb.
I was very excited about the option of built in satellite radio, as my wife and I drive through many different FM station areas quite often. However, the signal reliability, or lack of reliability, means we won't be extending past the trial period. Some areas, it'll stay off with no connection longer than it'll stay connected...
WARNING: SiriusXM rant. Nothing directly to do with Prius Prime. The thing that really ticks me off about SiriusXM is their "old cell phone/cable" business model. I have a few Amazon Echo's around the house and when I play SiriusXM on one of them it gets disabled on all the others. Give me a break, I can't run more than one in the same house? Also, their insistence on full price per radio is a broken business model. What about family plans where additional radios subscriptions cost a bit less? I did subscribe for a year at a discounted price, but I am really unsure about renewing at the end of the year.
I use satellite almost exclusively (almost no good non-country music channels available on FM (price to pay living less than an hour from Nashville). I have no problems with dropouts. In fact I'll go back and forth from Kentucky to NJ through the mountains of West Virginia and not have any dropouts at all (except for the tunnels on the PA turnpike which are going through mountains).
