Some older detectors tested once again?

I would like to see some of the winners of old radar detector tests tested once again agains't the newest crop of the latest detectors.

Uniden use to do quite well in these tests..

Stalkervision:

Good time to ask that question. Last week during a field test of new radar detectors I took along a 20-year-old Escort Passport and ran it through the same tests.

The chart below compares it to the BEL RX65, Escort 9500i and Valentine One at my Curve Test Site. Two of these have been tested several times at the same location.

This 1980s-vintage Escort Passport was known as a hot performer. But to be fair, it was asked to accomplish a comparatively simple task: detect X- and K-band radar. It didn't have to detect Ka band, lasers or POP radar
nor was it required to be invisible to the Spectre RDD (radar detector detector).

With no need for complex multi-tasking, the old Escort Passport could devote all of its energy to sniffing out just two radar bands. This gives it a huge advantage over the latest radar detectors.

My Curve Test Site is designed to separate front-runners from the losers. The police radar vehicle is hunkered down in the middle of a plunging S-curve, picking off targets as they pop into view at about 650 feet of range. With the radar aimed at a sharp angle away from the target’s direction of travel and shooting off into space, there’s nothing to deflect the beam into the detector’s antenna.

Here, detectors that spotted the same radar at 5.3 miles at my Straightaway Test Site were lucky to detect it at a fraction of that distance.

I reviewed my 1991 tests of the Passport’s competition from BEL and Whistler and am confident that both would turn in similar scores if retested today.


Craig

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Craig's Sig:

Protect yourself: Learn everything you need to know about police radar, lasers and laser jammers and radar detectors from the man Automobile magazine calls "the world's most-quoted authority on speed-measuring technology and tactics, and an underground legend among speeders"

Read Driver's Guide to Police Radar, the definitive guide to radar, lasers, time/distance computers and police speed-enforcement tactics

Member of The National Motorists Organization since 1990.

Wow that is pretty impressive for something that is 20 years old.
Even some of the new models do not do that well today.

WOW I just found this thread and it is very good to see. Have the 4 detectors above ever been tested with Ka?

I knew the RX65 was a great performer but I didn't know that it blew the doors off of a v1 in the K band. It's funny because I replaced my V1 with a RX65 and overall was much happier with it.

The V1 has an edge on K band in terms of raw sensitivity. So a V1 will always outperform virtually every other windshield radar detector when tested in the lab against a slowly increasing steady radar signal. Yet Bel/Escort hold a few unique patents for detecting true radar signals buried in the electronic noise floor within the signal detection circuitry. This is why, in the real world, a radar detector with less "raw" sensitivity can perform as well or even slightly better compared to another radar detector which has superior "raw" sensitivity.

Another thing about the M4 antenna design used in all of the current Vectors, RX65, 8500 X50, and windshield mount 9500 series. The M4 antenna is fairly well optimized for on-axis radar detection, but has a fairly rapid roll-off in sensitivity more than 20 degrees off-axis. This works out rather well for most real world driving since this optimization gives the M4 antenna good "reach" for relatively on-axis detection yet reduces off-axis false alerts while driving around town or in cities.

But yeah, the RX65 performs splendidly in the real world for highway driving. The RX65, as well as all of the other Bel/Escort products which I supervised the testing of at SML 2008, all detected every X, K and Ka band radar gun shot at them from 10 miles during the final day's straight-line long distance test. That test included 33.8, 34.7 and 35.5 Ka radar guns even though SML published test results only for 34.7 Ka.

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MEM-TEK's Sig: