Deep Dive Valentine One Review V1connection, Part III
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| Valentine One Front View |
I would like to profile some of the extant capabilities and incipient ones, beginning with the V1's multiple antennae, use of directional arrows, and their interrelated capabilities.
Arrows
What can I say about the V1's arrows that have not already been said for years? Plenty, actually.
It's been long documented that the Valentine One is the only detector which sports both a radar and laser receiver facing forward as well as backward. Certainly this configuration allows for greater detection abilities of radar or laser which emanate from your six, but it also allows for something no other detector can do, which is to be able to alert you to where the threat source is from the moment it is first detected to when you pass it and when it no longer remains a threat. VR calls this providing situation awareness. I prefer to use the terms, situational awareness though either is apt.
There are certainly instances where the arrows will convey more information about the dynamics of an impending threat than alert toning and signal ramping alone could. This is especially true of other detectors that do a poor job at either or both of them. While there are many instances that I could point to where arrows offer additional protection than mere one dimensional alerting does, I will highlight just a couple I have encountered on more than one occasion.
The first is, once I was driving on I-287N towards the NY thruway just south of Paramus, NJ. I was driving at the time with, not a V1, but a Beltronics Pro RX-65 (a great detector in its own right, now discontinued). The '65 began alerting to an X-band source (a radar band that has been used in NJ for decades) with a slow but ever increasing signal strength. Giving the relative weakness of the alert, I left my speed unchanged, anticipating to only slow down when I got into the "red-zone" where my speed could actually be clocked from the stationery hidden source that lay ahead of me and at which point the detector would be squawking at its maximum.
Slowly but surely, as I expected, the strength of the alerts grew in intensity. The RX-65 was alerting at about the equivalent of about 7 out of 10 bars, meaning that I was getting very close and ready to lay off the gas. Problem was though, my interpretation of what the detector--with its only one antenna facing forward--was telling me was insufficient.
When I happen to glance at my side view mirror, I saw 'em and I immediately got that burning sick feeling in my stomach (that I am sure so many of you are familiar just before those colorful lights come on behind you). What I saw was, in fact, a NJ state trooper's patrol car approaching directly behind me. I am certain he had my speed clocked, but I was most fortunate.
While I was doing 80 or so in a 65 zone (certainly ticketable) he was comfortable at cruising at 90 or so. I backed off, without hitting my brakes as to not alert him that I was now painfully aware of his presence. I got out of the left lane and sure enough he was interested in something better than me and I watched him, with great relief, slowly pass me by. When it was all said and done, I knew if I had had my V1 on the windshield, I would have known immediately that the threat was coming from behind from the very outset of the detection and therefore more prepared to deal with him as a consequence.
Arrows coupled with threat ("bogey") counting
Beyond the arrows, the V1 also can count and indicate up to nine continuous detections of varying band. Now I can hear you saying, why would I ever need such a capability? There is no way I will encounter nine police radars at the same time and you would certainly be correct (well almost). But, that's not the end of the story, to the contrary the combined use of bogey counting and directional information allows the V1 to alert to both the greatest threat (by strength and/or band) when more than one bogey (at different frequencies) is detected while also receiving radar from multiple directions, all at the same time.
This can be especially critical if you are approaching a real police radar threat source, while at the same time are detecting other sources that are not threats (such as x-band or k-band door openers, speed signs, drone signs, or moving sources of radar, such as lane-departure systems). In such circumstances the V1 will tell you by blinking the arrow that is pointing towards the direction with which you should be most concerned. No other detector has the ability to convey such a multi-dimensional threat scenario as the V1 can.
A real-world experience that I've experienced that has demonstrated this utility was, one time I was approaching a patrol car (who had been operating radar) that was on the side of the road and in the process of serving a customer, feeling pretty safe having passed him I began returning to my cruising speed. Thing was, the V1 was still alerting to an additional bogey in front of me, even though I had passed 'em. What was that all about? What the V1 turned out to be telling me was that there was something else ahead that I needed to be more concerned with. In response, I refrained from kicking it up a notch and sure enough there he was, another patrol vehicle hidden in the median ready to catch his next prey (which very well could have been me).
In both of these examples (and there are countless more I could cite), the V1's unique ability to convey a multi-dimensional view of both real and non-threat scenarios separates it from all other detectors.
But I can already hear some of you saying, Veil Guy this is old news. V1s have been doing these sorts of things for years (and you'd be right), so tell me something I don't know.
Fair enough. What are some lesser known capabilities the V1's multiple antennae and use of arrows provide but often go unappreciated?
One capability that lends itself to making this detector an absolute pleasure to drive with is its auto-muting behavior. Today's V1s provide superior muting, I believe, to every other detector. I didn't feel this was always the case. Escort and Beltronics detectors have long had the advantage providing four features that weren't to be found on previous V1s.
The first is auto-muting. Auto-muting works this way. When an initial alert occurs, it happens at full alert volume (what ever was set by the driver), but then the detector mutes itself to a lower volume--as it is assumed your attention has already been grabbed.
The second one is easy manual muting. With a quick push of a button located on the power cord itself and within easy reach you can manually mute any alert. The Valentine, in contrast, hadn't historically offered auto-muting to any great degree which meant that you had to always push the main button on the front of the panel (at longer reach) to mute the detections. If additional bogeys were detected, then that required additional effort.
Sure, there were certain instances that you could configure some variation of muting control but it was an absolute bear to do it with the rudimentary programming ability of older V1s. The austere control and display, which had been an asset, quickly became a liability during its programming as compared to the ease of programming of other brands such as those offered by Beltronics, Escort, Whistler and even Cobra. Old V1s were really tough to work with in that department and felt like a throwback to the 70s. I avoided tinkering with them as a consequence.
The third sort of muting available from Beltronics and Escort came from their GPS-enabled detectors' speed sensitive muting. I have found this feature very useful when driving around town, stopped at a traffic light, or driving very slowly. These models determined your speed in real-time and if you are going slowly enough, would alert with an abbreviated tone. Even current V1s can't do this (on their own) because they have no such GPS capability built-in. (Will revisit this in the future).
There are risks associated with this approach too, risks that I personally am not willing to take for the sake of quieting down a detector. It has been documented by some that bona-fide police radar sources have inadvertently been "locked-out." Not a good thing and something that you personally want to avoid at all costs. The other risks are is that it is not generally precise enough nor frequency specific enough to really be effective. In other words, it is like cutting a steak with a butter knife.
For example, when I have approached a stationery road sign transmitting a K-band signal towards me as I approach from one direction, I have GPS locked-out the source. The thing is, though, the GPS sphere (radius) of locking out a signal only goes so far and is not vectored-based (ie; cognizant of the direction of travel), which in my case was East bound. This meant as I had already passed the sign and it was far in my rear view, my GPS-enabled detector was still detecting the source and eventually began alerting again once outside of the sphere of the initial GPS-marked location for filtering.
This meant I had to push it again to lock-out the signal again. In doing so we have created quite a large area where another genuine alert source (ie; a trooper with K-band) could be targeting and I would not be alerted to since the GPS filtering would be filtering it out. Nope, not worth the risk.
On my return trip, now westbound, since my initial detection of the same stationery K-band source is now farther east now that the front antenna is seeing the source, my initial detection to it is even farther away this time than what is was when I was heading the other direction. So what does this mean? You guessed it, I had to GPS lock-out a third time, making that stretch of road containing three spheres of filtering and making the the area of filtering that much broader. If you throw in automated lock-out, I believe you will find yourself in the potential position in being with the extended stretch of road vulnerable to an actual police radar source operating on K-band along that same stretch of road.
While there are plenty of drivers who are more than willing to make these sorts of trade offs because they value a quiet detector over all else (and I can accept that), there are others, like myself, that won't. I always want to be alerted to the scenarios I face, whether they be non-threatening, threatening, or a hybrid of both non-threatening and threatening (which happens often enough that it matters).
The other aspect I appreciate about getting alerts, is that it let's me know that my detector is working and in tip-top form. A detector that is too quiet makes me uncomfortable. Could the unit be turned off? Could the power cord have worked its way out of the cigarette lighter without my knowledge? These things can and do happen and as such I want to hear my detector squawk every now and then just to let me know that it's there doing what it is supposed to do.
So with all that being said, why do I feel that the current V1 with its unique muting provides a superior approach? Simple. Because it works so well. What the two antenna and arrows now give you is livability and much better muting capabilities than with any other detector that I have yet driven.
The V1 is the only detector that can automatically mute and un-mute itself in response with changing dynamics of both signal strength and direction. It is also customizable how it mutes and un-mutes automatically. For example, the V1 can mute the alert while the alert is below a certain threshold of signal strength as you approach the source, un-mute itself when you are sufficiently close to the source were the alerting strength is where it could matter, and then re-mute itself as you pass the source that no longer remains a threat.
That's very cool and makes for a far more pleasurable driving experience. The icing on the cake is that the V1 is the only detector available that allows you the ability to set the volumes of both muted and un-muted volumes separately.
There are sure to be other virtues of having multiple antennae and directional arrows, but these are the ones that immediately come to mind and are, I trust, sufficient enough to merit their value.
Next: Deep Dive Review: Valentine One with V1connection, PART IV
Previous: Deep Dive Review: Valentine One with V1connection, PART II
VG
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