The Alpine EU unit sells in Europe at a converted price of about $1,000 U.S. and has no way of working in North America. First, we don't have anything that broadcasts the right format and on the correct frequencies to work with an offshore receiver. We still go through that problem today, where any car stereo in Europe will not tune the AM and FM bands properly in the U.S. or Canada. The second problem is that, in North America, we use the NTSC (National Television Standards Committee, or my favorite "Never Twice the Same Color") format for television, while much of Europe uses the PAL (Phase Alternating Line) system. Meanwhile, France invented and furthered the SECAM (Squentiel couleur mmoire, French for "Sequential Color with Memory") standard, which is used in the former Communist block countries like Russia. The Alpine TUE-T200DVB is a PAL device that will only work in Europe.
The Raysat T5 is roughly the same price, however, it is a conventional DBS (digital broadcast satellite) antenna system. Really, the T5 is the phased array antenna system that will work with a variety of receivers. A mobile receiver can come with a hefty price, so one of your options is to use the T5 array with an ordinary home satellite receiver. You will need little more than a 12-volt to 120-volt power converter unless you find a receiver that runs on 12 volts DC. (That reminds me, I should pop the cover off of a satellite receiver and check the secondary voltage on the power supply-it might be pretty easy to modify for direct DC operation!)
My whole vision for using a Raysat (at the time I was looking at a low-profile prototype called the "Stealthray") was that it could be custom formed into the roof of a vehicle as part of a custom installation for a show car. I found that when formed into the roof of a sport compact car, it would be next to invisible.
Here is the key for any satellite antenna installation-it must have a completely unobstructed view of the sky. That means if it is to be formed into the roof of a car, it would need to be the top surface of the roof. Placing a taxi dome on the roof is fine, providing it is, for example, at the front of the roof while the antenna array is further back on the roof. Don't place the taxi dome on top of the antenna!
Here is where enthusiasts will make some incorrect assumptions about how satellite antennas work and install them in such a way that they can't perform. It is a common occurrence for someone to install a satellite radio antenna inside the vehicle, thinking that "it has a view of the sky through the glass"-but it's not good enough. Even though a satellite radio will work for the most part when the antenna is not outside the vehicle, there are performance hits that you will experience from time to time. That is why both Sirius and XM advocate only an externally positioned antenna as being acceptable. A GPS antenna will often work inside a vehicle as well, but in this case we are usually tracking three to six satellites-if one drops off due to being blocked by the roof, you will still receive positional information, perhaps without the altitude component. Satellite radio has only one or two transponders in position at one time. Satellite TV has only one satellite, making the antenna position even more critical.