Veil Guy's Escort iX Review/Preview

Escort iX Review/Preview

Escort's Passport 9500ix finally passes the baton to a proper successor, the Escort iX

By Veil Guy — July 27, 2016

Escort iX

After nearly eight years--one of the longest product runs years for Escort--the Escort Passport 9500ix is passing the baton to its proper successor, the all new Escort iX.

It's interesting to note that the new Escort iX is lacking the "Passport" moniker like that of the Redline and the Max 360 while still appearing on the X70 and Max2 models.  It's a little confusing in the branding as to why some products are named using Passport and others are not.  Perhaps this will become more apparent as time moves on.

Speaking of time, back in the day, the most annoying sources of false alerts were to stationery X-band and K-band door openers and certain "cheaply" designed radar detectors which were prone to set off other nearby radar detectors to Ka band.

Unfortunately, those days are long gone and have given way to the biggest threat that we radar detector owners face today.  Contrary to what you may be thinking, it isn't the patrol officer down the road operating instant-on police radar, it's the ever increasing use of K-band radar based collision avoidance technology that present so much signal interference.  Why is this such a problem? It's because your radar detector may become unusable.

With this in mind, I am pleased to see the Passport 9500ix be formally retired as its design did not account for this development as this technology simply didn't exist at its inception.

The longevity of the 9500ix had on more than one occasion been called into question and yet it managed to avoid the chopping block as its historical (sales) success could not be denied.

So while a 10 plus year product life-span is most impressive, the simple fact of the matter is that the RF landscape has deteriorated so severely--thanks to the likes of Hella--that newer more advanced approaches had to be engineered.  This brings us to the new Escort iX.


Read the full Escort iX review/preview to see what Escort brings to the table.

Veil Guy