Atlest you recieved a neat installation. The tech at Future Shop stuck the suction cup in the middle of my windshield with the antenna wire hanging and the antenna on the dash. The power adaptor was pluged into the lighter, but the extra wire was shoved into my glove compartment. So there was wire everywhere and a big mount in the middle of the windshield. It looked like my dashboard exploded. They still charged me 50 bucks after complaining with the manager.
I drove home and installed it myself in about 20 minutes perfectly.

Future Shop n Best Buy better get on the ball.

Dave

Sounds like you had a retail hell experience, almost as bad as the guy that paid for his “free” installation and was arrested for paying in $2 bills… Best Buy could have looked up your purchase in their computer to verify your purchase. It seems like they just want to get by on minimalist effort. A letter or talk with management may or may not help, but at least you will feel better that you tried to do something… Remember free isn’t always free and sometimes you get what you pay for…Most professional installers charge by the hour(around $50/hr) and materials/parts/fabrication used and go by price quotes and some will honor a price quote if they do go over the time quoted to gain future business, since most of their jobs are done by word of mouth and reputation is everything.

Some nice clean and proper installs involve placing the SAT antenna slightly hidden from view under a color matched or sharkfin cover to make it look more stock if you have a roof :). Some installers are smart and can do the same for trunk mounted antennae with color matched snap on covers and cable covers so it blends well and looks stock. And if they are real smart they will mount it under a trunk spoiler if one exists, since most are hollow and made of plastic, position closest to the FM antennae if the user is using FM modulation instead of direct connection to a radio head unit. The wires are then run through the trunk cable wire channel in the trunk arms, through the back seat and under the carpet along the driver or passanger side. I have used both XM and Sirius hardware via the windshield antennae and only had dropouts in tunnels, underpasses, parking garages,etc. I only had problems with heavy tree cover with an XM Roady 2 with the antenna mounted in the dash, problem was solved when relocated to the roof via the sunroof and headliner snake with a little channel cut in the weather seal and resealed with RTV.

1) How is the sound quality with the Kenwood adapter? Many people complain about poor sound quality.

2) Does the headunit display the song/artist information for both the iPod and Sirius?

3) Is the iPod interface clunky or is similar to using the click-wheel?

Thanks!

To quote one of my (least) favorite politicians: “I feel your pain.” Stuff like that drives me nuts because almost no one gives two hoots about service *after* they have your money. And, the value of your time involved fixing these sorts of things (time is money, of course) often exceeds the value of the purchase in the first place (which is one of the primary reasons the retailer doesn’t want to spend any of *its* time on this).

Btw, what’s your Skype status? I finally got back into my account yesterday after giving them my life’s story so they would change my email address. That only took almost a month to straighten out. Talk about wasted time… And, to this day, I’ve seen nothing anywhere (except on a few blogs) talking about what a mess Skype caused.

Go back to reviewing tabletpc’s instead of your own follies.

Best Buy is clueless in this case. I hope someone over there will make this right for you.

Want to know a secret? Buy one share of Best Buy (ticket symbol is BBY). Not to make money on the share, (though if they try to weasel money out of customers like this, then maybe you will! :) ) Think of it as the extended warranty to end all extended warranties. Employee’s not being helpful? Manager not back it up? You’re not just a customer anymore. You’re an owner. That’s right, you own 1 gazillionth of the company. They know that the VP of customer relations has too many issues to look at one customer’s complaint. But the VP of shareholder relations will take complaints seriously. After all, the employees technically work for you.

It’s not a surefire way to get around a lot of the retail BS that exists today, but I’ve found it often helps. Any time you find an employee not being helpful, not treating the customer like he’s right, and all sorts of other good business sense – take that sense into him. They work for the shareholders, whether they know it or not.

When you start asking for their store number, employee id number, etc because you want to reference it on a letter to shareholder relations, they might start taking you a little more seriously.

It sounds odd at first, but if you think about it – even just one share of the company does in fact make you an owner.

I also installed my wife’s MyFi receiver in her Corolla. I put the antenna on the side of the dash (not even in the middle where mine is) and have had no problems. This unit uses the same Delphi antenna as my SkiFi2.

I have observed in the past that Sirius’ technology seems to be a year or more behind XM. XM’s antennas have made great strides forward in reception recently. The Delphi MyFi even has an internal antenna! I suspect the Best Buy installers were correct that the dash-mount antenna would work fine… for a modern Delphi XM antenna.

One final thought. If your Saab has the shiny copper coating in the windshield, this will definitely interfere with all signals. This is a major no-no with radar detectors, for example.