Is It Supposed To Be Disposable?

I got one use out of this product.

Driving around the country for work all summer in rental cars, I fell in love with XM Radio.  No matter what rural area I was driving through, I had good music and news at my fingertips.  And no matter what city I was driving through, I had the same stations on the radio instead of having to scan through dozens of stations in hopes of finding one I liked when half of them were playing ads through the scan.

I bought this unit on sale at Best Buy for just a few dollars with the purchase of a $55/3-month subscription to Sirius XM (the newly merged company.)

I plan on installing a new stereo into my car that will allow me to plug an XM reciever directly into the car stereo, but for a family trip over the holidays, I used a cassette-adapter to play XM from the audio output of the unit into the cassette deck of the car stereo.

For the first, 6 hour leg of the roundtrip, the unit worked beautifully.  Other than the fact that my favorite of XM stations from my summer experience was eliminated from the service during the merger, I was happy with my purchase.  And my family enjoyed the music - especially the seasonal station we found that played classic Christmas tunes.

Then...

The next time I got into the vehicle at our vacation destination after the drive there, I plugged the unit back in and it did not turn on.  I checked and double checked all of the connections and the unit was dead.

Actually, as Miracle Max said in The Princess Bride, "...your friend here is only MOSTLY dead."

After fiddling around with the unit and its connections for a few minutes, it suddenly awakened.

It played for a few minutes, then the screen froze and none of the buttons on the unit would function.  The music was still playing, but I could no longer see the title of the song or artist when each song changed and none of the other functions of the unit worked.

So, I unplugged it for a hard reboot (the power button would not turn the unit off).  Want to guess what happened next?  Yep, wouldn't turn on again.

Rinse, repeat; rinse repeat...

Over time, after getting the unit humming once again, I would leave all connections attached except one to restart the unit in hopes of finding the weak connection but that did not help.  There are three connections that could be the problem:  The plug in to the cigarette plug; the power in to the base of the unit; and the plug from the base into the actual radio.

The fourth option is that there is an internal power problem that has nothing to do with the connections.

The freezing up of the unit might reinforce that probability.

So, long story short (too late), I will obviously be returning the unit to Best Buy.

But, I am not sure what to do.  Do I buy the same, inexpensive unit again and hope for better results?  Do I spend more money - that I don't want to spend - on a more expensive unit?  Or, adding this experience to the demise of my favorite station on the network, do I just give up on the new Sirius XM and rely instead on the front-input of my new car stereo and listen to my iPod on the road?

I'll let you know what I decide and how the new unit works out if that is what I decide to do...

P.S.:  Normally, I would review all of the functions on the unit - like the number of station pre-sets; the ability to save your favorite artist so that the unit will indicate to you when they have a song playing on the network; the readability of the menus; and all the bells and whistles - only, I got so little use out of the unit that I can not adequately give you those details...)