So you’ve decided that you want to buy a radar detector, but the amount of choices out there has left you bewildered about which one to buy. Luckily, there are only a select few worth buying and this article will help you decide which one is the best radar detector for you.
The first question to ask yourself is, “How much do I want to spend?”. If you came up with a number lower than $150 dollars, the best option for you right now is to not buy anything and keep saving your money. If you came up with a number between $150 and $200, your best option is to buy a refurbished Escort Passport 8500 from Escort Radar’s eBay store. If you have $300 to spend, you should get either an Escort Passport 8500 X50 or a Beltronics RX65. All the radar detectors previously mentioned will serve you well, but if you want extreme performance, you need to bump your budget up to $400 to $500.
If you have $400 to $500, your decision just got very difficult as there are a bunch of radar detectors available at that price point with different feature sets that you need to consider. The top devices on the market today are the Valentine One, the Escort Redline, the Beltronics STi Driver and the Escort Passport 9500ix. While all excellent performers, each of the have their own pros and cons.
The Escort Redline is currently the undisputed king of sensitivity and will alert further than all other devices in most situations. The Valentine One is the top performer in the area of reaction time and will alert faster than most other devices on the market. The Escort Passport 9500ix is the best radar detector for filtering out false alerts as it has a unique GPS feature that will automatically filter out false signals based on frequency and location.
To help you determine which is right for you, we’ll take a look at each of these features separately so you can decide which is the most important to you. Sensitivity should be high on everyone’s list as the more sensitive radar detectors will alert the furthest from the police officer radar gun. The more warning time you have, the more time you’ll have to correct your speed and slow down. The Escort Redline and the Valentine One are very close most of the time with the Redline slightly edging out the Valentine in most situations. The 9500ix lags behind both, but it will provide Bodrum Escort enough sensitivity for most situations.
Reactivity is a radar detector’s ability to alert to radar sources as quickly as possible. This feature is becoming more and more important as police officers are able to engage their radar guns, get a speed, and disengage them faster than ever. A lot of radar detectors won’t even alert at all in a situation like this. Out of the top 4 units listed above, only the Valentine One has great reaction time to super fast radar sources. The Valentine One is known to detect short bursts of radar much more often than both the Redline and the 9500ix.
Selectivity is the radar detector’s ability to filter out false alerts. Only the Escort Passport 9500ix has the ability to automatically learn and suppress false alarms by location and radar frequency. If you pass by the same false alert three times, the 9500ix will learn the location and you will not be alerted to that radar source in the future. It’s important to note that only that radar source is suppressed, if a new radar source appears in the same location, that will cause an alert on this unit. Neither the Redline nor the Valentine one have this feature.
Bottom line is, if you are looking for raw detection distance, go with the Escort Redline, if you are looking for the best reaction time, go with the Valentine One, but if you are looking for a radar detector that doesn’t alert unnecessarily, go with the Escort Passport 9500ix.