Factory Satellite, or aftermarket?
 

I have a tape deck in my 98 that I want to upgrade to a factory CD HU. I've had too many aftermaket decks stolen.

So I was floating around Ebay and found some factory Sat-ready HUs, but wondered if it was worth the trouble. What else do I need to make a factory sat head unit pull in sat signals. Obviously antenna and subscription, but is there a sat tuner in the HU? Or did the factory sat setups have a separate tuner in the dash?

Sure would be nice to have Sat all in one stealth unit instead of an aftermarket tuner hanging off the dash for all the world to see.

The factory Sirius ready HU's have a separate receiver that is located behind the HU. I do not know the cost but it is a clean look. IMO the factory display sucks compared to the aftermarket receiver I had for 4 years. Fewer presets, the song title and the artist info cannot be displayed at the same time...you have to push a button and toggle between the two, and every time you start the truck it defaults back to display the channel name.

I just bought a factory nav unit off of ebay for my 2008 SuperCrew as I like the clean factory look (just my preference). I also bought a Delphi Sirius tuner which is required for the newer receivers. The brand new ones (I think 09 plus) have the tuner built in. Intalling the radio and Sirius tuner took me about 20-30 minutes but everything was plug and play.

The 09 factory radio uses a seperate tuner for Sirius as well.

I stand corrected then...

OEM sat radios (non-Nav display) are _terrible_. They change one channel at a time and you need to wait for them to tune each time in order to see what is playing. My AM tuner allows me to scroll through channels while the current channel is still playing. Also, I can see about 7 channels at one time. It also stores up to 30 minutes of the current channel in case I want to play something over again.

I have both, my wife made me get the Factory unit in her Ford Edge, becuase she doesn't listen to Sirius and wanted the clean look but I hate it. It is real basic, you cant pause rewind or save song/artist alerts like many of the aftermarkets. I have a Portable that I take between my Truck and my commuter car. It saves me money vs. paying for a 3rd subscription and has hell of a lot more features than a factory unit. I bought a Vehicle specific mount from TSSRadio.com for like $30.00 and it looks 100 times better than the suction cup mounts you get with the aftermarket units.