Hi,
due to an unfortunate accident in January, I was forced to sell my VR '08 SS to Allstate and buy an '09 Imperial Blue SS to replace it.

Did they change things on the XM portion of the radio for 09s?
I've been trying to figure out how to get the song title to display continuously, and the (i) button doesn't seem to work the way it does on my 08 LT and did on my ex-08 SS.

Hitting the (i) button shows the name of the artist and the song (one above the other) and doesn't have the menu function that I was familiar with.

After playing around with it some, it now alternates between the artist, song, and channel - which is pretty annoying ;-)
(not sure how I did that)

I also seem to be limited to just these channels:

0,1,7,16,20,54,55,57,62,73,116,144,151,247

What is really weird is some of the channel presets refer to channels that I can't access - like "8".

If I hit the preset for "8" - it briefly displays "Unauthorized".

Does this mean that someone locked out all of the other channels?

Thinking that maybe the radio needed an XM Refresh, I went to get the radio ID by tuning to channel 0 - and.... nothing.

It displays that it is on channel 0 - but does not show the channel ID.

Is XM only partially activated on this thing?

If not - then how the heck do I unlock the rest of the channels?

Thanks

 

Have you looked in the Owners Manual for how the 09 radio works?
There might be some small changes to how it works.

 

Think I can answer the part about only getting certain xm stations. Now it would seem that you should still have the 3 month free XM, if not I would be asking the dealer or call xm to find out why not. For those of us that did not renew, xm was/is trying to get us back as paying subscribers by giving us for a limited time only certain stations and those you listed maybe the ones.

 

He's right about the limited channels on XM, my guess is that the dealer did not activate your 3 month trial and you are only getting the temporary freebies.

 

Goto the XM website and there's a way to reset the channels in an XM radio. I've had to do it once before when my Subscription ran out and I re hooked it up. Same thing happened only had a certain amount of channels till I reseted the system

 

Ah - In the past, this same dealer has always activated XM for me when I was due to pick up the car.
Since it was three weeks after buying the car before I could pick it up - they may have forgotten to do it -
or assumed it was activated since it seemed to work during the test drive.

Is this something they can do via a call to XM, or do I need to run back to the dealership?

Thanks!

 

There seems to be some sort of dealer trial activation. It worked fine on the dealer lot but as we drove off the wife discovered many stations didn't work. When we stopped for lunch and came out and turned the radio back on it worked not at all.

You call the XM people and give them your radio code, they can help you get it out of the radio, then they will activate it for you.

 

They should be able to handle over the phone unless there is a programing issue with the radio itself.

 

I emailed my Dealer, and he looked up the radio ID and went to XM's refresh
page and that resulted in it getting all of the stations.

I'm still stymied with the currently playing song display.
With the '08 radios, you hit the (i) button and a small menu appears which allows you to select either the artist, song name, etc for constant display.

I prefer having the song title displayed - over the artist or channel name.

With the 09, that menu is missing. Is this normal?
The only helpful mention I could find in the manual was 'autotext'
Enabling this is supposed to scroll text that is too long to fit on the display
all at once.

However, when I enabled it, it toggles the display between the artist name,
the song, and the channel name.
And it continually toggles - which can be distracting when driving at night.

Is that my only choice - autotext or nothing?

if so -

 

My 2009 base radio display operates just like yours.

Looks like another radio feature was deleted in the 2009. The other feature I wish I had is the ability to adjust the “Turn Signal” chime volume level.

See this post for some info on the radio, perhaps ChevyMgr could help.
https://www.chevyhhr.net/forums/show...&postcount=208

The important part:
"Recommendation/Instructions:
Important: There was a radio supplier change at the beginning of the 2009 model year FOR ALL VEHICLES LISTED ABOVE, and we lost the ability to adjust the chime volume."