The XACT Visor satellite radio made me do a double take. It happened two days after I'd installed the uniquely designed Visor in my van. I was gathering my notes for this review when I pulled up the radio's page on the Crutchfield website to double-check something. The Visor's page loaded in my browser and I saw it?a selling price of $50.

These days, most new satellite radios are going for around $100-$300 dollars. That's why I was boggled when I saw the Visor's price. My eyes spun around with little spirals, my tongue shot out of my mouth and smoke billowed from my ears. I bounced around the office exclaiming, "A satellite radio for $50!" Where my office mate found the giant mallet, I don't know, but that's what it took to settle me down.

Okay, all cartoony hyperbole aside, fifty dollar satellite radios are here. After having used it for two days, I thought the XACT Visor was pretty cool. But upon learning you'd only pay a fraction of what I considered the usual price for such a device?it was an incredible bargain.

By now, the smart consumer in you is asking, "Hey Robert, what's the downside? What am I not getting?" You're right to ask. There are a couple of convenience features that this radio doesn't have. Let's take a look.

• Chief among the missing features is a ?song memory' so that the radio can alert you when one of your favorite songs is playing on another channel. The Visor won't do that.
• The other sacrifice is the one-line display. Most satellite radios have three or four lines. Despite only having one line, the display scrolls fast enough that I quickly got comfortable with it. It doesn't take long to show me the artist and song title.

"That's it? Surely there must be more that I'm sacrificing at this price? Ah, what about an antenna or a remote control?" Not to worry; they're both included. The Visor has everything you need for listening in the car, and is a full-function satellite radio.

The XTR3 comes with everything you need to listen in the car.

The only short-coming that I found in the XACT Visor is navigating across categories on the single-line display. Since you can't see a list of categories, or channels within a category, you need to have a pretty good handle on navigation.

Similarly, selecting the right preset station can be tough because there is no way to scroll through the 36 presets. Unless you can remember which channel you stored on each preset, you have to press each one in turn until you find the channel you want. The best way to handle this is to take the time to organize your presets. There are six groups (or "bands") of six presets?36 presets in all. I put my most-often listened to channels on five of the first band. These are three music channels, the comedy channel, and the kids channel. On the second band, I stored my favorite rock channels. My favorite news and entertainment channels live on the third band. That's enough to keep me in touch with my favorites. From any one of them, it's easy to scroll through the line-up to find anything else that might strike my fancy.