Fixing Sirius XM poor reception in the southern USA

 Up in the midwest you can get Sirius XM anywhere.  signal is full 5 bars everywhere even under trees.   I move to florida and I have been fighting with signal strength.    SiruisXM techs are 100% worthless,  "change your antenna"  your stuff is broken,  but please re sign up...    etc....

Come to find out the Southern USA is on the fringe of the signal area for XM.  they aim for northern minnesota for where the strongest signal is.   

this weekend I decided, it's time to beat this.  so I tried several antennas, all sucked badly compared to the built in antenna on my honda and dropped out worse if they had signal at all.   this is when I  started looking at it not as "radio"  but as a satellite Reception and grabbed my old Dish TV tools.  I have a signal strength meter as well as a tuner that can show me the spectrum the dish LNB feeds  to the receiver.   I was looking fore a way to get up to 2.4ghz so I could look at the raw signal and I remembered the SDR tool a friend said I could use to rapidly point a dish by sticking it at the focal and you could see the signal spikes.

I grabbed it and used some adapters to go from the farka connector to a SMA...  powered up the laptop and looked...   the antenna was barely pulling in a signal,  as I tested more and more antennas I either had 10 broken antennas or signal strength was horrible.    This started my search for  XM amplifiers. and I found one.  it's for home use.

 Pixel technologies makes one for Sirius XM that needs to feed multiple receivers from one antenna or very long runs.   $18 later along with some adapters to go from F connector to standard  XM connectors and I had something to test.

These need 5V fed to them,  luckily my Radio feeds that voltage so that it can drive an amplified antenna. (I have been unable to find amplified antennas other than for home use)   before putting this in I had 1 bar wavering and dropping out.   after inserting it  I went to 3 bars  solid and 5 bars when I had clear sky.   areas where it went completely out now only has lower strength and no drop outs.

If you need to try something....  This may be your answer.  don't expect help from SiriusXM,  they do not hire anyone that knows anything about satellite or RF or even how their radios work.