I’ve never understood houseboats. Bad houses, worse boats. How many seemingly congruous combo "things" have ever been as good as their separate components? TV/VCR’s? No. TV’s can last decades, yet VCRs seldom last 5 years. TV/DVD players? Same problem. SUV’s? If you want a sports car yet need a truck, even a Porsche Cayenne Turbo isn’t as good a sports car or truck as the Porsche Cayman S and Ford F-150 you could buy for the Cayenne’s $115,000+.
Nine out of ten illegal cross-country racers agree…the $400 Valentine 1 Radar/Laser Detector is El Jefe. Numerous excellent GPS units are available from Garmin, Tom Tom and Magellan starting at $200.
So, for $600 you can buy a V1 radar detector and a perfectly fine GPS, which means Uniden’s new houseboat, if priced at $600 or more, would have to better both the V1 and any given $200 GPS at both their respective jobs in order to justify its price. And, since the Uniden doesn’t include the laser detection built into the V1 (however useless, but that’s another story), Uniden would have to (or at least should) price their unit below $600 in order to make any sense.
Of course, there are people who would gladly pay for an all-in-one if only to save space, but in this case saving space is a fallacy, IMHO. Why? Because GPS usability dictates the screen/controls remain within arms reach, at or below eye level when driving, which means on or just below the dashtop. But radar detector effectiveness dictates that the unit itself - inside which the radar sensors reside - be placed as high as possible on the windshield.
I’ll reserve judgment on Uniden’s new unit until details are announced. Uniden makes many other fantastic products I swear by, but I stand by my view of houseboats, however well-designed. For the same price, I’d rather buy the best house and boat I can afford.
(Thank Gizmodo’s Wilson Rothman for this one.)
In my opinion, the key here is synergy.
As you pointed out, if it’s just two devices stuffed into the same box: bad.
If it’s two devices working together: good. Or potentially so.
There are two items that GPS offers to radar detection; elimination of false positives and known threats.
False positives:
The X and K bands are cluttered with non radar gun devices, door openers, alarms and such. A bulk of these devices are stationary. A GPS equipped radar detector should be able to discover and mark these signals in order to suppress alarm. This is what the escort 9500i is attempting to do.
Known threats:
In areas where you are detecting intermittent X or K signals or any Ka, Ku or Laser signals, you can build up a database of speed traps. Additionally, non radar threats could be added, i.e. photo enforcement devices, air patrol areas and the like.
All this said, the kicker here is implementation. A single radar receiver would give you signal strength. Two, like the V1 uses, allows you differentiate between front, back and side. Three or more would give you a vector. And the holy grail would be sharing data between all users.
Personally, I don’t see anyone getting it right the first time or two.
As someone who works with stuff like this all the time I can tell you where the problem is going to sit. It’s not going to be the hardware that the unit has but the lack of good software for it. It is technically possible to use a Garmin GPS along with a rigged up Valentine to do exactly what Lee is suggesting but none of the makers are ever going to nail it exactly right. Almost all of the Garmin GPS units are exactly the same with the exception of software and screen size.
It’s going to take the work of people in the community to do something like this and do it right. Open source is brilliant stuff.
Just think about it… a V1 rigged up with bluetooth could communicate the info to a GPS unit like those from MacVision/Nextar and spit the data back upstream to a server for sharing. Anyone out there with the spare time should quickly do this. It could net you some easy money and if the product is community developed then I’m sure lots of the expert speeders would jump on for the chance to give their input to the project.
I like reading up on car pc implementations, now and again, just to see how well some folks are doing. http://www.mp3car.com/
There are projects on-going to reverse-engineer the V1s remote display comms protocols so to display on a PC screen when the V1 alerts.
http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/software-software-development/48165-v1-virtual-display-skinnable-valentine-one-pc-software.html
Also GPS mapping stuff is well advanced, http://www.ja-gps.com.au/software_index.html
Easily obtainable code to log and display survey data. A combo of the two would do just what you are talking about!
Here in the UK, several websites compile databases in different GPS formats for all known speed trap sites, combining the three is the grail you are after!!!
Pity I’ve not got a clue where to start…. :-((
rgds
Phil
This is all interesting. I was taking to a friend who is a computer science major and he suggested using a strategy that WarDrivers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_driving) use.
He claims that in theory using a laptop with a pc based police scanner you could map police radio signals (like Bear Tracker) on to a map, triangulation would not be possible but you may be able to determine distance by signal strength. Map speed trap info over that map and you may have something useful. The trick as always would be writing the programs.
For the record, not only ‘auto enthusiast’ should be interested, things are very out of hand when it comes to tickets these days. http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/18/1818.asp
If you are a V1 lover like myself but want the benefits of using a GPS to limit your falses and such SpeedCheetah makes a GPS mirror that integrates with your detector. You can set a cetrtain speed below you don’t want the radar detector to sound alert, and it some with all the traffic camera’s you need for your area in the mirror to warn you about speed camera’s and red light camera’s!!! I was lucky enough to see a pre production unit at a Radar Detector / Laser jammer testing event in March of 2007 by the Guys Of Lidar and I was thoroughly impressed with the mirror’s capabilities. You can even use the mirror to alert you for your laser jammer. All this mirror does is clip over your existing one…I am certain purchasing this mirror after i upgrade my jammer set-up
I’d love to see a programmable screen such as the I-drive’s that you could tie in with the V1, GPS, bluetooth, and a network so you could vary the warnings on the screen (according to priority.) A two way communication capability so you could link the data together with other similiarly equipped cars would be *very* helpful. The technology is there, someone just has to add it all together, without sacrificing capabilty of any of the individual parts, as Alex said.