The Sirius reception on our recent trip across Utah/Nevada and N. Cal to the coast, then up to the Seattle area and back to Colorado via Idaho presented no reception problems at all until Sirius simply cut us off 4 days from home.
We had waited for the relatively inexpensive 6-month renewal offer to come in the mail as the original trial subscription which came with the car neared expiration, and as recommended by several people here on this forum, then promptly mailed in a check in plenty of time before the deadline, but they cut us off anyway.
When we got home we checked and found that Sirius had indeed cashed the check a full week before the deadline, which is when they disconnected us, so they basically spent about a week simply stealing money from us.
We were able to get the issue sorted by phone, but not before having to firmly correct the on-script functionary who kept insisting the problem was our "fault" for letting the subscription "expire" and continually resisting our attempts to simply get reconnected for the cheaper subscription we had bought and for which they had accepted payment when they cashed the check.
He grudgingly moved from "we can't do it at that special price" because we had "let the subscription expire, to "well maybe I can swing it if you'll put a credit card on file with us", to finally just pushing the button and reconnecting. A process which, once begun, took all of 60 seconds. The entire argumentative and unpleasant phone call, which should have taken 2 minutes at most, lasted almost 10 minutes.
What they want, of course, is to badger you for a CC card number so they can hammer it for the full-freight subscription price for another 6 months if you forget (so easy to do) to cancel the subscription before it expires.
All in all, it's an aggressive and very disagreeable business model, but for people like us, who are miles from the nearest cellphone signals and any decent radio station reception, and who don't have big music libraries on disc or in some electronic device, they're really about the only game in town.
Here in the mountains, if we want to listen to the news at all (the BBC on Sirius isn't too bad, actually), or play a little music we're not familiar with as a change of pace, its Sirius or silence, and they know it.