Central TN Test Meet Redline & V1

Central Tennessee Test Meet, Aug 15, 2010
Swamp & KnightHawk
The test course was a 1000'+ long 2 lane paved area with diagonal parking spaces on the right and a building on the left as viewed going away from the gun. The building was set 30'-40' back from the curb. No other radar sources were detected within 2 miles of the test area. Weather was slightly overcast, hot and humid.
The radar gun transmitter was covered with a filter to reduce the signal strength was placed on the dash of KnightHawk's vehicle, level and pointing straight down the test course. The RD's were placed on center of the windshield of my truck just below the RVM, level and pointing straight ahead. All RD's were power cycled and given enough time to complete their power-on self-test before each run. I drove just letting the truck idle, which kept the speed between 4 and 5 MPH on all runs. KnightHawk took notes and swapped RD's and such, and when a RD alerted I braked firmly and then took a distance reading using a Ultralite 20-20 to KnightHawk's vehicle while standing beside the truck with the driver's door open.
We did the tests against 33.8 first and 35.5 second. When we got the sub-200 feet readings with the V1's we then did a run with the Redline to check if the signal from the radar gun was getting weak or anything like that, and then resumed making runs with whichever V1 we were testing at the time.

Ka 33.8...........................................Ka 35.5

Swamp - V1 3.872

Run# Feet....................................Run# Feet
1 697..........................................1 632
2 688..........................................2 626
3 679..........................................3 184
.................................................. .4 620

Swamp Redline - 3909 Build Date
Run# Feet...................................Run# Feet.............Run# Feet
1 686.........................................1 669...................4 674
2 676.........................................2 666...................5 641
3 669.........................................3 648...................6 635
4 662

KnightHawk - V1 3.812
Run# Feet.....................................Run# Feet
1 674...........................................1 182
2 672...........................................2 184
3 674...........................................3 154

KnightHawk - V1 3.872
Run# Feet.....................................Run# Feet
1 674...........................................1 182
2 630...........................................2 624
3 443...........................................3 619

KnightHawk V1 3.813
Run# Feet.....................................Run# Feet
1 628...........................................1 189
2 662...........................................2 191
3 647...........................................3 184 (The original number of 84' may not have been correct.)

After this, we did two runs at 23-25 MPH against 67ms POP, with POP enabled on my Redline and V1. Both RD alerted within 1/4 second of each other at around 650-680'. Distance measurements were not taken during these runs; I'm estimating the distance compared to where I was on the course when the RD's alerted during the other runs.

Wow, those are some crazy results with the V1 on 35.5 ... good thing they are good at Q/T and have the arrows. :/

Good job testing.

Hi Gents, thanks for testing! Interesting results that make me continue to feel good about owning the latest version of V1.

Again, I thank you guys for fine efforts, and respect the results for what they are. I have three questions. You probably won't entertain questions 2, 3 & 4, but I'll ask them anyway.

1) What were the V1 settings? I'm assuming pop on, guard on for every V1.

2) In your opinion/s, what percentage reduction did the filter reduce pre-test range of each unit? If not specifically measured or mathematically estimated, perhaps you could add this on the wish list for any future tests. I predict most on this forum would not care ("the test is what it is, and you can draw your own conclusion") but personally, I'd like to know more about the filter, and its impact.

3) And I am not expecting an answer to this, but I notice that on 35.5, by averaging the seven 3.872 V1 results only (498 feet) and averaging six Redline results (655 feet), there's a difference of 157 feet. Considering that 157 feet difference, how would/should/could this translate to the real world? For example, if the filter reduced range by half, do you think the distance difference might/could be doubled to get a speculative number that might could then be interpreted against other known values such as PSL and seconds to line-of-sight to threat.

4) Did you do any runs of each detector against the gun without the filter? If not, perhaps you could also pretty please add that to the wish-list too.

1. All V1 settings was POP on and Ka guard on.
2. We only had a limited distance of about 900 to 1000 ft. for testing and of course it was max out without filtering the radar range. We used 3 disc based on the performance of the RL to bring it down to 600 ft. with 33.8 and did not change any filtering with 35.5 other than changing the antenna's. We could have just use 2 disc to go up to maybe 800 ft. But we went ahead and used 3 disc for filtering aside from the antenna jacket - antenna jacket is also a filtering device same as the dics material. Regardless of the number of disc or filtering, all the radar units were subjected to the amount of filtering in both the 33.8 and 35.5 test runs.
3. We cannot translate this to any realworld scenarios and I don't want to make any assumptions. All we did was just get the raw datas during the test. All test was pretty much line of sight and used a laser gun to measure the distance. The problem I myself and Swamp noticed that the V1's were not consistent specially with the 872's with 35.5 and at one point with 33.8 but they were better than the 812/813 with 35.5. which we already found out during the King of the V1 test. In the 812/813 vs. 35.5, honestly, we both were very shocked to see the numbers. We don't have no explaination other than the RL's performance was better.
4. We did not test any of the RD's without filtering the range.

If you guys have notice in post # 1 that there were many RL test runs with 35.5. This is because, when we found the numbers to be very low with the 812/813, we had to test the RL after we completed the 812/813 test runs to make sure that power from the car supplying the radar unit was not being drained. We were suspecting that something was decreasing the radar range and all we thought was power drain. But after testing it with the RL after each test with the 812/813, that suspicion was dismissed.

Thanks mate!

Thanks Guys for taking the time to do the testing and sharing your results. Me being a V1 guy, I'm alittle disappointed at the Ka 35.5 results. Here lately I have been getting some very short alerts and it might be 35.5 because it has not been IO.

KnightHawk PM'd me and said that he thinks his notes may have been in error, and that the 84' reading should have been 184'.
I will edit my original post (if I still can) and change the last reading in the second column to read 184'.
The Redline was in H mode with all bands enabled and POP off. My V1 was in "A" mode with no other filtering applied, although Ka-guard was on (filtered setting).

I will agree with KnightHawk's reply above that these distances, or the percentage of difference between the various RD's, cannot and should not be extrapolated into longer distances. This was one test and only one test. All I will to say is "These are the results that we obtained under a certain specific set of conditions."

As before mentioned, thanks for taking the time for this test. I am surprised also the 35.5 #s are that low.

Take this information as a grain of salt. Hopefully some other test will come out soon. Swamp was worried about his V1's performance. Here is an excerpt of his PM to me prior to the test.

Quote:

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I've had 3-4 encounters where my RL out-detected the V1 by such a wide margin that it wasn't even funny--I was able to slow down from 75 to 55 before the V1 alerted while towing a 16,000 lb trailer with a 7500 lb truck. Mounting position did favor the RL, but I am still a bit concerned. The V1 has never out-performed the RL in a similiar manner.

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I thought that his concern was more of the realworld scenarios and running 2 RD's at the same time. But the test showed what his concern was. We will someday redo the test with just 2 disc and see how it performs. But one thing is for sure, we will do a rematch in the near future.