Truelock gets me again!

[RadarKid]

So I'm cruising to one of my shows Saturday night, and as I approach a known shopping center that I'd previously locked out, and all of a sudden Kband goes off. I was like WTF. I've already locked this out going both ways.

So again I, "mute, mute, mute" for a SIGNAL LOCKED OUT, and just as I do - BOOM - I pass a LEO sitting at the lights to pull out of the shopping center.

DOH!

[djrams80]

So, the Truelock worked just as it was supposed to, but you didn't trust it.

[RadarKid]

So, the Truelock worked just as it was supposed to, but you didn't trust it.

yes....thats correct.

[djrams80]

You need to go back there and unlock the LEOs radar signal.

[CJR238]

Always be weary when you get another alert at a previously locked out area, don’t just lock it out.
If you didn’t immediately unlock when you saw the LEO you will need to go back. As long as the false you previously locked out is in the same lock out area (1/10 to 1/2mi of the LEO lock out) the 9500I will unlock every radar signal it received in that area.

Frequency drift is always possible, but in theses cases you should always follow the rule to not lock out a false until you have experienced/passed it quite a few times.

[thestaton]

I agree with the other guys calm down on the freq lockouts until you are 150% certain. If these minor squabbles of K band are unsettling you than I don't think your prepared for the screaming of a laser jammer while traveling over the PSL

[focalcivic]

<~~~~~~~~~~~~Slaps Radarkids hand..................and takes away the 9500i, gets a cobra instead

[mrcllusb]

Now that will give you a wakeup call.."LASER,LASER,LASER,FRONT SHIFTING"

[bnguyen]

Heh there is a shopping center that will emit K band right as you are merging onto a major highway where I live. I drove by that same spot atleast 4 times just to make sure there was no LEO on the interstate shooting radar. If I know I'm not going to drive by that same place for awhile, I wait untill the signal goes down to a bare minimum and keep my eyes out, if it does not go back up and there is no LEO I'll lock it out.

[MEM-TEK]

So, the Truelock worked just as it was supposed to, but you didn't trust it.

yes....thats correct.

Hi RadarKid,

It took me several months of testing Truelock before I finally figured out how to use it and to trust it!

Initially I would pull up to a shopping center, lock out the location, and then drive through the shopping center to be sure that the 9500i saw all of the door openers by driving really close to all of the door openers. Unfortunately this method automatically caused my 9500i to set the lockout radius to a huge 1/2 mile radius, and the really strong signals from the door openers caused the 9500i to lock out frequency chunks which it shouldn't have. I was of the opinion that Truelock did not work properly at all since most of the time my 9500i would not alert to police radar whenever I encountered it within any of the 1/2 mile radius locked out areas. To me, it appeared that the 9500i was locking out an entire 1 mile wide GPS cell as described in Escort's years old patent for a GPS radar detector.

Then The Professor came along with his neat 9500i Commander software which allowed me to read out the lockout data from my 9500i. I discovered, as he already had, that Truelock stores lockout locations to an accuracy of at least 16 feet. I started round two of Truelock testing now that I was armed with the ability to see the stored data within my 9500i. I also did some thinking about any problems with the notion of driving right up to door openers before locking them out. I realized (especially after The Professor mentioned that there was some data for each lockout location which he wasn't sure about) that the 9500i must also be storing information about what size of lockout radius to use based on the intensity of the locked out falses, and that driving up to the door openers potentially could be overloading the 9500i's antenna so that it was incorrectly locking out some additional frequency chunks.

For round two of testing, I decided to lock out several test locations and also sometimes my K band transmitter by being sure to never get closer than around 200 feet from any of the door openers. To reduce the signal from my K band transmitter, I simply stuck it atop my car's roof so that the transmitter was pointing at the sky. This greatly reduced the signal which my 9500i saw from my K band transmitter. I discovered that, since I never got really close to any of the door openers, my 9500i would set each location's lockout radius to a mere 1/10 mile and would also accurately lock out just the correct frequency chunks for the door openers. One particular location which I locked out (the new Ingles grocery store in town) has a door opener which transmits on exactly 24.15K band. After locking out that location, later on I encountered a local police officer with customer pulled over. My 9500i happily alerted to his 24.15K band radar as I approached and was some 600 to 800 feet away from the locked out Ingles location. Had I locked out the Ingles by driving up to the door openers, then I wouldn't have gotten any alert to his radar gun until I was at least 1/2 mile away from the Ingles.

So, in the end, I finally figured out that I could trust Truelock if I use it just as Escort shows in their videos and graphics. I simply lock out locations when I am driving along and getting pretty close to passing the sources of the false alerts. Thanks to The Professor's software, I also discovered that the 9500i seems to temporarily store info about the locations of weak X or K signals detected fairly close by each locked out location. If the 9500i sees these same weak signals on subsequent occasions, then the 9500i automatically adds these weak signals to the lockout list, usually with their own independent GPS location relative to the the GPS location of the fairly nearby door openers which I had locked out. From what I can tell, the 9500i does subsequently "learn" about each locked out location. Thus it doesn't seem to be at all necessary to "get close" to the door openers in order to be "sure" that the 9500i is seeing all of the door openers which you want to lock out. The 9500i seems to handle this stuff automatically after a few subsequent passes by the locked out location.

Well, in light of all of the above, it should be obvious why Escort decided to make Truelock an automatic function on their new 9500ci since me and a lot of other people were "over thinking" and incorrectly using the 9500i's Truelock by driving right up to door openers.