Xm Problem In My 08 Gx

zittibull · April 17, 2008

When I start my 08 GX, the XM radio, if left on a channel from before, will most of the time play the prieview channel, which means I need to manually change the radio back to the channel I was listening to before the vehicle was shut off. This happens about 80% of the time. I brought it to the dealer's attention and they referred me to the shop who did the aftermarket installation. The tech there spent several hours trying to fix the problem without success. They even conferred with the people at Vaistech who bacally said thet I am supposed to get some sort of delay in finding a station and if it dosen't find one, will default to the prieview channel. They mentioned something being a problem with the version of my radio and there is no firmware upgrade available at this time.

This is my 4th XM radio and the first one to have this problem. Does anyone else here on the board have similar issues? If so, were they resolved?

Omegaman · April 19, 2008

When I start my 08 GX, the XM radio, if left on a channel from before, will most of the time play the prieview channel, which means I need to manually change the radio back to the channel I was listening to before the vehicle was shut off. This happens about 80% of the time. I brought it to the dealer's attention and they referred me to the shop who did the aftermarket installation. The tech there spent several hours trying to fix the problem without success. They even conferred with the people at Vaistech who bacally said thet I am supposed to get some sort of delay in finding a station and if it dosen't find one, will default to the prieview channel. They mentioned something being a problem with the version of my radio and there is no firmware upgrade available at this time.
This is my 4th XM radio and the first one to have this problem. Does anyone else here on the board have similar issues? If so, were they resolved?

zittibull: Although I cannot say for sure, it sounds to me like your issue may be related to your antenna/antennas, or the XM radio itself. If the radio cannot tune in the last station you had it on when you turned the key off (when you turn it back on), and that last station in your case was a XM station, then the XM will default to channel 001. There is a delay of a few seconds to allow the channel to be received, so the other possibility is that the installation has some way affected this delay (causing the radio to take longer than the time out to pick up a station). XM radio takes longer to tune a station initially because it has to determine that you are allowed to receive it (you have paid for it).

Maybe the following will help narrow it down;

1) Does this occur on all the freq, that is AM, FM1, FM2, SAT1, SAT2, and SAT3 or just on the XM? That is, if you have the radio on some strong FM channel and turn the vehicle off and then back on, will it come back on with that channel playing?

2) Did they somehow affect your antenna/antennas when they did the installation?

3) I assume that the XM radio is separate from the regular radio (I assume you had a XM radio installed in addition to the radio that came with the vehicle) so do both radios come on at the same time, or is there some delay powering on between them? Since I do not know what kind of installation they did, I do not know how the new XM installation affects the factory radio and the factory radio affects (or not) the XM radio.

The problem appears to me to be that the XM radio is not tuning in your previous channel quick enough to prevent the timer which automatically tunes the radio to channel 001 from going off. The question is why? The answer could be the particular model of XM radio you have takes too long to tune in a station (this I would think would be a defect in the particular radio or a design flaw if all radios of this model do the same thing), or there is some problem with the antenna. The latter would most likely affect how your normally receive XM stations and if you have no problem in the same location that you are having this issue, then this could be ruled out. Finally, maybe some problem exists with verifying your XM account that causes an extra delay when you first power it on. You might try re-registering with the XM service, or ask them to verify it is working properly (your account information is all correct).

Omegaman