XTR8 - Lifetime membership SHUT DOWN!!! HELP!
I don't friggen believe this, but I love my XACT Replay XTR8 that is hooked up in my car directly to 12V, has no proprietary "dock" connectors and just works wonderful!
I have a Lifetime membership since 11/04, and last week, coincidentally 11/08 it stopped service. I called, and they told me my account was messed up (had a future start date) and that they couldn't fix it right away, to wait 24 hours. I then called everyday for a week and same story. I finally got someone on the phone who finally decided to delete the account and recreate the account... and they've been trying to send me activation signals for 2 days now... NOTHING.
Now they claim my radio is bad... gee how convenient. And I've been reading through the forums and I'm starting to see what is going on. It looks like that I'm screwed now. My radio might be junk now if what everybody is saying about the freq's is true. So, to get my service back, I'd have to get a new radio, wire a new power supply in my car, deal with a clunky dock thing. And...how is this MY problem?????
WTF? I even have other monthly radios on my account. This is unbelievable.
This whole merger thing is a bunch of bull, and I could care less about Oprah and the other crap they have, I want my Howard and the other Sirius stuff I signed a Lifetime membership for!
And, by the way, they tell me that the Lifetimes end automatically after 4 years "in case" you didn't need it anymore, and you just need to call and let them to know keep it going...
I'm going to be calling the Corporate office number in the morning: 212-584-5100 to give them my 2 cents.
If anybody has suggestions or helpful comments, please let me know. I'll be sure to post my outcome here. I'm really ticked off though.
XTR8 - Lifetime membership SHUT DOWN!!! HELP!
One more thing...
I've seen posts from some reseller guys who are peeved that Sirius did this and that these older radios will no longer activate. If this is true, and there are a bunch of us out there, is anybody interested in a class-action suit?
They're just begging for it if what I'm reading from some people is true, that they tell you your radio is bad to buy a new one, then to find out that its their activation signals that have obsoleted your radio when they promised not to do just that before the merger? And some of us have lifetime accounts?? Oh yah, that really smells like a class action to me...
Contact me if you have any information that would be helpful.
XTR8 - Lifetime membership SHUT DOWN!!! HELP!
Update -
XACT told me that the XTR8 will not play audio on 184 after its been activated then deactivated. This was Sirius' excuse for saying the radio is bad.
Called Sirius Corporate, spoke to a nice customer relations person, she did not offer to get my radio working, but instead send me a new one. I'm not that thrilled since if it ends up being a 5v radio I'd have to rewire my car and deal with a dock. I told them to send me one anyway.
XACT then called me back and offerred to sell me a new XTR8 and are wanting to dump boomboxes for next to nothing, so I took one of those as well.
In the end, I'm sure I'll be able to get something working on my Lifetime account, and a free radio, but I'm still kinda ticked that they can't get my would-be-working radio back up now after screwing it up.
Not exactly solved... Whats going on with the XACT radios?
I waited over a month for them to send a free radio, never came.
I called Customer Relations again, they said that they didn't have nor were ever going to have in stock the radio they promised to send to me.
The next best thing was the ST4 which they were out of stock, so they sent me a cheap Stratus5, nothing close to my XTR8 I was used to. They did say that I could have an ST4 when they come in.
If you care about my continuing story... I decided to see if I could still get my hands on a replacement XTR8 from XACT rather than using the Stratus5. I called XACT directly and they sold me a new XTR8 and a boombox for about $80. Seemed like a good deal at the time.
So, I tried to activate my new XTR8 and Sirius says its $75 to transfer my ESN. I told had him talk to a supervisor after a little arguing, and they waived it. I could be wrong, but when I signed up for the lifetime plans with all my friends back in 2004 I read the agreement pretty thoroughly and I don't remember fees for changing ESN's, but I admit, it may not have been stated, or left open.
So I get my new XTR8 activated, and it barely works. SAT signal levels seems to pulsate and audio drops out every few seconds making it unlistenable. My old one never did this. I assume it was broken, so I sent it back to XACT and asked for a repair/replacement. They sent me another one. This time, before arguing about the $75 ESN change fee, I have been testing it on the preview channel. Same darn thing. Sat level indicator pulsates about once a second up, then down, and audio drops out often.
I took my wife's ST4 and put it in my car side by side with the XTR8 swapped antennas and not even a hiccup.
So, here's my conclusion (I could be totally wrong, but its very suspicious):
The XTR8's originally sold by XACT, no longer officially making/selling radios for Sirius after the FM transmitter lawsuit, and also are not compatible with XM channels, may not work anymore very well...
--- Nov 08, they turned off my subscription to my lifetime membersion on my XTR8. They could not reactivate it. Radio is bricked.
--- Brand new XTR8's are having trouble with sat signal. I have read a bunch on forums back during the merger and have seen a lot of warranted speculation on the newer signals messing up the older radios.
It also sucks big time that I have to fight to get the ESN changed over without fees from all these problems.
In the end, I've been out of my lifetime subscription service for about two months. I've spent the last four weeks screwing around with the XACT radios.