XM Satellite Radio dishes up novelty to the FM-weary

The stations are commercial-free and aren't saturated with Britney Spears.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
MIAMI -- An elderly man wearing khaki pants and a golf polo leans across the front desk of XM Satellite Radio's office in Boca Raton, Fla.
Cheerfully he asks the receptionist, a middle-aged woman with a diamond nose stud, if he can bring his friends in for a tour. "Because we don't understand it -- how it works, this satellite radio," he explains.
The poor guy -- probably not a spy -- has no shot. He isn't getting past the lobby.
This is XM's Innovation Center, the creative heart of a company that has more than 2.1 million subscribers and predicts that it will have 3.1 million by the end of the year.
How it works
Subscribers buy a receiver and pay a $9.99 monthly fee for 24-hour access to more than 120 radio channels. Since 2001, they have been signing up to revel in a spectrum of programming that now stretches from Radio Disney to Raw's uncensored hip-hop, and from Laugh USA to Family Talk, to every conceivable musical era or genre.
Its music stations are commercial-free and limit the FM-weary listener's exposure to Britney Spears.
XM was the first satellite radio service, but by mid-2002 a second -- Sirius Satellite Radio -- had entered the market. It is XM's only competitor, with about half a million listeners.
XM's featureless office building and heavy security are testament to the very real possibility of infiltration by corporate spies.
"We have to be careful," laughed Stell Patsiokas, XM's executive vice president of technology and engineering.
The 51-year-old product designer with a doctorate in electrical engineering spent nearly two decades at Boca Raton-based Motorola, creating the company's first cell phones and two-way pagers. An XM corporate headhunter called him in 1998.
Patsiokas had many invitations to leave the telecommunications giant, but this call was different.
Here was a chance to lead the brightest industrial designers and engineers as they develop radio receivers. And, more intriguing, to configure a way to get two massive satellites -- one called Rock, the other Roll -- to beam scores of CD-quality radio channels to customers' cars and homes.
"I was into it, you know, this is the next thing," he said, in a Greek accent he's maintained since immigrating to the United States in the early 1970s.
Obstacles
There were obstacles -- including XM's complete lack of infrastructure or revenue. "This ain't going to work," Patsiokas recalled telling Hugh Panero, XM's chief executive.
Panero would later place in the company's Washington, D.C., main control room a custom-made replica of the chair from which "Star Trek's" Captain Kirk commanded the Starship Enterprise.
And Patsiokas accepted the company's challenge, which amounted to boldly going where no one had gone before. Along the way, he recruited several colleagues from Motorola.
For more than two years, they "went to hell and back," he said, figuring out how on earth -- literally -- to simulate the orbital range of the Rock and Roll satellites.
Operating on smaller salaries and with less stability than in their previous jobs, the team performed algebraic jujitsu to solve problems, including how to avoid signal "drop outs" or blips of silence, even when vehicles move below overpasses.
Then, one day before XM's technology wizards prepared to introduce their product to the world, terrorists flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center and another crashed ina field in Pennsylvania.
"That was pretty hard," remembers Tom Oberle, 36. "We didn't know if it would even happen and the other half of XM being in D.C..."
But the firm dusted itself off and began broadcasting three weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. Its receivers began flying off the shelves of electronics stores. Executives and programmers assumed that the service would appeal primarily to young white males, but the product crossed all demographic lines.
XM has more than 120 offerings, satisfying reggae, pop, heavy metal, folk, Big Band, talk radio and the Los Angeles-based Playboy Channel, which subscribers pay a premium to receive.
Familiar voice
Former National Public Radio Morning Edition host Bob Edwards recently announced that he will relocate his coffee, pop tarts and authoritative voice to XM's morning lineup.
A specialist in digital circuitry and audio processing, Oberle left Motorola, along with colleagues Terry Helstrom and Wendi Williams.
He likes being part of something that people actually use, rather than working with anonymous circuitry.
"It's a lot cooler to say to your family, 'Hey, I built that thing you're listening to' than 'Hey, I built that tiny blue box on top of that telephone pole.'"