Blaxer

I am supposed to get my 06' slk55 this week and the dealer just sent me the window sticker and it was missing the sirius satelite radio which I explicitly asked for. When I first ordered the car (almost 8 months ago) I did ask for Sirius and my salesman said they could install it in the dealership no problem so we did not have to order it with the car. Now I am being told that on the 06 it is not possible to add Sirius and needless to say I am pretty upset. Can anyone confirm this? Part numbers? I do have the dvd nav package 320 if that makes any difference. Maybe I should post this in the SLK forum?

jcanabal

I'm out of town, but when I get back I'll check on mine. I think mine came with it and not installed at the dealer. But I'm sure it can be done with no problem!

PS It's worth it!

JMC

chitownc32

Honestly what you could do is run the vin through vmi. It should say on there sat. sirius ready. I know on mine it did. When you run that report it lists all options your car has. I think you should be able to. The sirius module is about 400.

Blaxer

Sorry, I'm a bit of a noob what is the VMI? I really appreciate the assistance!

chitownc32

i think its vehicle master inquiry from mercedes benz it lists all options and exactly what was done for services by vin number if you want give me your vin and I can run a report for you. I work for LUxury Motors in Illinois and we are partners with mercedes benz let me know I'm at work right now

silk32

on all 06 slk55's sirus is a standard option.

Blaxer

Not sure I understand what you mean by standard option. I talked to the dealer again, he brought up the VIN and is still saying there is no wiring pre-built into the 06 SLK's for Sirius like it was on the 05.

gdsmith56

On the SLK55 that we just picked up, Sirius was listed as a $500 CREDIT against the price of the DVD-NAV Entertainment package.

In other words, the car was ordered with Sirius, charged against the car for Sirius, but when it arrived there was no Sirius so we got a $500 credit against the original cost of the Sirius.

We don't miss it

silk32

i thought sirus was a standard option now on the car. my sticker does not list it nor did the order. but it came installed

LETO

Happened to me as well, sertain SLK's that fell into a certain build time window were credited sirius for $500. It is likely that the factory was out of sirius recievers.

It cant be added on by the dealer on the SLK as of now, like the CD changer

Do what i did and get a i-pod link it should run $500 with parts and labor.

novabenz

Per Leto's post above, that's really sad for those who wanted the Siruis radio option and didn't get it.
I guess that I am lucky that MB had the parts in stock to make this happen.

Dozer42

Heh, I've got Sirius and I don't want it. :\

It's ok and all, but it cuts out far far too often for my taste. Every overpass, in the garage, etc.

Sorry, but it doesn't take a friggin' genius to install a few bytes of ram, and then cache the signal so it wouldn't cut out unless you lost the sat for like 15 seconds.

Instead, I'm going with the iPod kit. A $300 player that holds 60gb worth of music? That works for me.

Blaxer

novabenz, the dealer installed it on your 06 ? Do you think it would be possible for me to call your salesman and ask them how they did it??

Florp

Sure, as long as you don't mind waiting for 15 seconds before you hear anything every time you turn Sirius on.

Personally, I woudn't consider that worth the trade for no drop-outs.

RSBSLK55

It would be worth it for me to have the signal cached. I find Sirus to be really lame. It cuts out so much it is almost unlistenable. I rarely use it and won't re-up when the contract expires.

novabenz

No, the Sirius radio was installed at the factory.

Blaxer

Well I am picking the car up tonight and it doesn't look like Sirius is an option at this point. But there has to be some way of adding the factory unit back in, anyone have ideas down that road?

Dozer42

Well, I must admit it would be a valid assumption that if they're just too stupid to put a cache in from the start, that they would also be too stupid to make it adjustable.

Of course they could make it so that you could dial the delay/cache to anything from 0 to 60 seconds, or whatever you'd like. It would also be fairly trivial to have it start caching as soon as the alarm button is pressed, so that by the time you're belted in it's already cached 60 seconds. It really would be quite easy if they just sat down and thought it through from the start.

This is 2005, not 1985. The thing is just very poorly engineered when they know from the beginning that they'll get dropouts. Does Microsoft own stock in Sirius or something?

jak112460

I just purchased a 2006 SLK55 and the dealer told me that as of now sirrius is not available as an addon for 2006 cars and that it will be in the next few months. I would really like to know the truth. I have navigation on mine also.

LETO

I will likely be available down the road....but it will probably be $500 for the parts plus labor = $800 (i did this on my G-class). Is it worth $800? In the G500, that is not i-pod link ready, yeah!.....but in the SLK....no. That is my logic regarding the matter.

Also, on logic 7.....sirius tends to come out of the center for music and hisses with speech

bloflin

I believe y'all are confusing having a "cache" to allow replay or to avoid skipping on portable CD players with some, as yet, uninvented method of replacing lost signal.

The rad sat datstream is realtime. When you lose signal (tunnels, buildings obstructing, etc.) the data is gone. If your sat rad cached, then you just wouldn't know it until 15 seconds later.

For your request to work, Sirius would have to have a complicated scheme where they time compress the signal and send in chunks, repeating each chunk multiple times.

Not gonna happen!

The better solution which XM seems to be ahead on, is terrestrial repeaters, particularly in denser cities. When I pull into my garage I can watch my radio switch from sat to terrestrial.

Dozer42

It's not really complicated at all. I mean, we were sending packets with error correction built into the signal more than 30 years ago, you'd think they'd be able to do the same today.

They can't be using absolutely 100% of the available bandwidth, so use the rest for error correction.

Simply compress the signal as usual, and chop it up and send it in rotating 10 second bursts. Send 10 seconds of channel 1, then 10 of channel 2, etc up to channel 10, and multiply this by say 15 to get 150 channels. No more bandwidth is being used, but you decrease your dropouts by a factor of ten, yet you increase their length to 10 seconds.

Personally I'd rather have one dropout for 10 seconds in a drive, rather than 10 dropouts of 1 second, which is what I get now.

Then take the extra bandwidth, whether it's 10%, 20%, or 50%, and send error correction (redundant) data down, also in burst mode, as far away from the original signal (timewise) as possible. You ignore channels like the weather channels and those which are infrequently used, and stick to the main channels that people listen to the most.

Now almost all of the dropouts are gone on the main channels, and when you do get one it will be on a fairly unused channel, and still it will be far far less than we get now with the current stream because the error correction data will replace as much as possible.

Cost to them? Oh, a couple hours of programming on the upstream and downstream. No cost for repeaters.

Of course, repeaters are a 100x better idea and Sirius should have them too. But they can do quite a bit to decrease their dropouts by a huge huge margin without costing a penny.

Yes, it would incur a very slight startup time of a couple seconds before your first packet arrives (whether it be the main packet or the error correction packet it should be there in under 5 seconds), just put up a message 'Acquiring Satellite Signal' and nobody will notice.

Blaxer

I'm not concerned about the cost or the caching issues or the sound quality. I am going to have Sirius in my car no matter what. I would like it to be factory integrated and not a jank thing screwed into the side of my dash. I appreciate the information on the topic at hand so far. If anyone has any more details about how what parts are needed, part numbers etc, that would be really helpful. I have Steve (mbenznl) checking on what he can come up with to make this happen but haven't heard back from him in a while now so I'm not too hopeful. My dealer is a bit lost so if your dealership has any information maybe you can put me in touch with who you are talking to? Again I really appreciate all of your help.

bloflin

Sorry Dozer it's not that easy, and doesn't work that way at all. ECC is to correct for errors in transmission, not for total replacement of data for extended periods of time (here when we talk extended periods of time, meaning 1 second or more). Your proposal, besides "doubling" the required bandwidth (which would either "half" the number of channels or "half" the SQ) would significantly increase the cost of the receivers.

First principle is to allow absolute lowest cost for the receivers (this is the part they have to build and sell in the tens of millions). It is not feasible to have enough memory to cache all the channels (or even the more popular ones). When you tune to a channel you are decoding that channel only.

My XM does have a 30 minute "cache". You can replay in case you didn't hear it correct (i.e. news) or even pause it while you run in the store. However, if you lose the signal, you have lost the signal. Further, if you change the channel then you've dumped the 30 minutes of save. It can't possibly cache all the channels.

Dozer42

Sorry Blofin, but it is that easy.

Take a minute to actually read what I wrote, I didn't say ECC correction. I said that there must be some bandwidth left on the table, and to use that to send redundant data down.

And no, it wouldn't take a huge amount of memory, in fact, if your XM radio can store 30 minutes of one channel, that would be enough to cache about 10 seconds of 150 channels, it's a pretty trivial amount by todays standards.

At least take 60 seconds to read what was written before dismissing it out of hand. It wouldn't increase their costs a penny to do it properly from the start. Memory is dirt cheap these days, otherwise they wouldn't have sprung for the memory to store a channel for 30 minutes, thanks for proving my point without realizing it.