I've been a long time Sirius subscriber and I'm on my fourth receiver now (never more than two active at a time). I have nothing against XM. It's great too. The installation I show here would work equally well for XM. If you spend any time in your car you should consider getting a subscription to one of these two services. I heard once that the satisfaction rating for sat radio is extremely high, and I'm sure that many others on this forum have good things to say about it too.
Oh well, I'm not trying to sell sat radio, but instead share my installation experience. As I mentioned, this is my fourth receiver and I have pretty modest sattelite radion needs at this point. My family doesn't need bells and whistles any longer, we all have a small set of stations we listen to and we have these channels memorized. In our other car, we have a Starmate Replay. It's a great receiver and I recommend it highly, but I couldn't find a radio headunit mounting bracket for the insight like we have for our other Honda.
Some other requirements I had: low profile, in keeping with the nature of the car itself (thank goodness the gaudy shark fin antennas are in the past now). No holes. I don't want to be drilling any holes in the car. I live in the Northwest—near rain forest territory—and so I don't want to worry about leaks because of my installation mistakes. Like many others have mentioned in previous sat radio posts, I've also had great success just placing the antenna on the dash. No external antenna mount means no leaks.
Lastly, "FM Trasmitter" is just fine for me in the Insight. I direct connected the Sirius receiver in my other car, but driving the Insight on the roads we have is not going to create a cabin environment akin to Carnegie Hall. These cars have a good amount of road noise whick makes any investment in better sound quality something to scrutinize greatly IMO.
So here is what I settled on. The very simple Sirius SV1 receiver (I got mine for $25 + shipping on Ebay). It comes with an antenna (the smallest one I've had for Sirius so far) and all the mounting stuff you will need. Here's a link on Crutchfield:
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-O7M2wHblSx ... 0&I=607SV1
First off, here's a finished installation.
http://dloop.us/insight/insight3.jpg
Now here's the installation process I used. My plan is to use the "Visor Mount" provided with the SV1 kit. (I make no claims to know what I'm doing here. I know just enough to get by).
For the antenna cable installation I started at the antenna end (not the SV1 plug end). Setting the antenna approximately where I wanted it on the dash, I fished the cable down to where the front hood release is.There is a lot of extra length in the antenna cable that I knew I wouldn't need so here I looped the excess several times leaving a few feet at the cable end to fish back up the door column to the driver's visor. Using zip ties I secured the extra 'looped' antenna cable under the dash--up and out of the way.
http://dloop.us/insight/insight5.jpg
Tucking the cable under the cabin side of the rubber door jam all the way up.
http://dloop.us/insight/insight4.jpg
The kit comes with some small velcro pads so I used one of them to secure the antenna to the dash.
http://dloop.us/insight/insight7.jpg
The power cord installation was similar to the antenna, except for the power cord I started with the SV1 plug-end at the visor and worked my way down the door column. Placing it under the rubber door jam in the same place as the Antenna cable and worked my way down to the same area near the front hood release.
http://dloop.us/insight/insight6.jpg
Right there, under the dash near the front hood release pull there is a fuse box and likely a good source for "switched power". Maybe someone here can comment on a suitable power tap at this location. For me, I'm not that smart so I headed for the trusty cigarette lighter wiring (I made sure it was off when the car if off, and for the install itself)
Following figgy's instructions for replacing the pollen filter here:
http://insight.fungiart.com/ I removed the glove box and center console which made easy access to the cigarette lighter wires. The SV1 power cord is a couple feet too short for this run so I needed to add an extension after cutting off the cigarette adapter plug.
Last was the visor mount itself. With the wiring complete this should have been the easy part but the design of the visor mount prevented the driver's visor itself from swinging into the full forward (sunlight blocking) position. Luckily the mount is made from very bendable metal and I was able to bend it into a shape that did not impede the function of the visor itself, and still holds the SV1 securely.
Voila, power it up, a quick call to Sirius activation, and 15 minutes later it was working great. I hope this helps if you are considering doing this.
Satellite Radio - Cheap & Easy
