Converting Satellite Radio tunes to MP3

[Zapata]

1.  Is it easy?  
2.  What equipment is needed?
3.  Is it legally any different from making a mix tape from (free) FM radio?  

Moving back to the States in November and definately getting satellite radio, just curious if anyone has "a friend" who does this.

Disclaimer - I neither condone this, nor plan to do it in the future.  I know theft is bad, bad, baaaaad, and anyone who steals is a terrible person.  God bless the RIAA.

[Boroda]

There was a Nokia-9600S reciever that had a built-in SCSI-II port, so you was capable transfer your sattelite data flow to a computer.

They are out of production, people like RIAA made Nokia stop making them. If you are lucky you can still get a used one for a decent price, and finding "special" firmware must not be a problem too at http://www.no-access.de

There are also solutions like SkyStar PCI reciever boards or Dreambox recievers that have a 100Mbit Ethernet built in.

I am not a specialist in this field, only helped to "compress" some non-copyrighted material to DivX.

The audio-stream from most of sat-radio stations is already in MP3, so you only have to capture it. Bitrates are quite high, 192-256 is a common thing, but some stations transmit in 384.