Sirius Stiletto 10

[bigred]

Anyone here have the stilleto 10? How does it do with reception on the headphone antennas? I had a sportster that was stolen and even with everything set up right it still didn't do a very good job in town. How does it perform on a bike?

Thank you

[Beck]

Anyone here have the stilleto 10? How does it do with reception on the headphone antennas? I had a sportster that was stolen and even with everything set up right it still didn't do a very good job in town. How does it perform on a bike?

Thank you

I assume that you are planning to use the Stiletto on your bike with in-helmet earphones.

You will have to figure out how to retain your headphone antenna or just get a car dock mounted on your bike so you can plug in a car antenna on it.

Now regarding Sirius equipment. Unfortunately, the Sirius branded equipment, made by "Directed Electronics" is mostly crap in terms of performance and reliability. Through the years that they have been in the market, they have suffered from bad equipment reliability (head units failing to antennas burning out plus real quirky operating systems that gets confused easily and do not take kindly to program updates.) A lot of them basically end up as, Sirius users say, "bricks". Just freeze up or go into a confused state that makes then permanently broken/useless. There had been lots of signal drop-off problems for many users every year. I would really consider waiting if I were you, for the newer models to come out from the recent Sirius/XM merger. As it is, there had been many problems with the Sirius units with the company doing changes to the system to merge the satellite signals from the two companies, with some important features suddenly not working on the Sirius units. Best to check out the non-Sirius branded units (Like the much more reliable XM based Pioneer Inno) that may come out, because Sirius isn't really improving their receiver's reliability even after so many years already. I have a Sirius S50 (First Sirius brand reciever to come out) that still works pretty good after two years already, because I had been especially careful with it and trained myself to operate it, which was really tricky because things not described in the owner's manual had to be done in certain ways if the unit is to remain working properly, but mine is certainly the exception to the rule.

Good luck if you do decide to use the Stiletto 10 anyway! but I can only give it one star as a review rating.

Beck

95 VFR

Edited December 13, 2008 by Beck

[pres589]

http://www.micro-ant.com/index.php?page=co...AAA-TSR-01A.txt

That's a nice Sirius antenna. Your headphone cord is not. The frequency range that Sirius works over is very narrow, and it's fairly short wavelength; a nice clean fraction of the wavelength is not going to be found in a one size fits none solution like using the headphone cord.

The antenna should be built into the device unless they have a bespoke antenna on offer along side the unit. As far as the unit you're asking about, I have no input at all. As far as antennas for that range, if you completely ignore weather issues and such, a piece of 12 gauge solid copper electrical wire cut to the proper length (which would probably be less than two inches) with some kind of loading balum on the end would probably work. I'm not an RF engineer and it's been a while since I've looked at such an arrangement so I can't think of how to better accomplish that off the top of my head, but this is probably way more information than you wanted anyway.

[Guest]

Anyone here have the stilleto 10? How does it do with reception on the headphone antennas? I had a sportster that was stolen and even with everything set up right it still didn't do a very good job in town. How does it perform on a bike?

Thank you

I tried the Stilleto and it gets crappy reception on a moving bike. It also eats batteries on satellite mode. Also, if you're a jazz fan, forget it.

So I started using it just as a mp3 player, and it works fine for that.

Edited December 13, 2008 by milesbandit

[Guest]

Another option is to use a portable FM radio to the earphones, with the Sirius signal through 88.7. or whichever station works.

I had a Sirius Starmate wired to my bike and used the FM radio for the power booster.

[sportrider]

I used this setup for an older sirius unit (not the stilleto) with no issues -- antenna on the tail worked just fine (ran wire under seat, along frame, and up to the area where I have the unit plugged in via the oh so very friendly gas tank bolt Ram mount), and I plugged the etymotics straight to the sirius unit. :biggrin:

You can just see the antenna on the tail in this pic:

100_2797.jpg

Here's the mount:

100_2804.jpg