What detector is best for Photo Radar?

**corrado959** · 02-10-2005, 04:59 PM

BiGeAsYgUy thanks for all the info....

Originally Posted by SmaartAasSaabr

Where in Canada do they use photo radar?

I know Quebec had it first, for about 6 months during the oil crisis... they tried it in Ontario in the 90's and the goverment was thrown out... and BC had it for a while and it was killed off there too from mass public anger...

I Live in Alberta. They are crazy about photo radar here. You see the vans everywhere. Red light cameras as well.

**SmaartAasSaabr** · 02-10-2005, 05:14 PM

Yeah but you are allowed to have detectors...

:?

Must have shipped all that equipment from BC a few km to the east when it was banned, eh?

**kaiserjacob** · 03-28-2005, 11:41 AM

Originally Posted by corrado959

Thank you all for your response..

Sethy

The way I had the two radars setup for testing was, I had one on one side of the windshield and the other one on the other side. Would that give me a false reading on both? I also tested them individually and got pretty much the same results. From what I’ve experienced the two radar detectors seemed to have about the same range when it came to Photo Radar detection.

how much range is that??

**nvr2fast** · 03-28-2005, 12:02 PM

I tried the V1 (v1.8), X50 and RX65. The X50 and RX65 were about the same, but 2 RX65s failed with SERVICEREQUIRED warning, and failed to detect 2 out of 10 runs, so i stick with the X50. It gave about 11 seconds warning going 60Kmph against Multanova KA photo radar. The V1 gave about 5-6 seconds. I recorded the multiple runs on video but they are huge at over 20-30Mb each.

If you are going 120Kmph, half the time... and half it again if you go 240 ;-)

Anyway, those were my finding, and quite a few other V1 owners switched to X50s after i did the video testing, and also found the X50 to have superier photo radar detection. This was on KA at 34.3 +/- 100Khz Multanova 6F/10. I find K to be plenty, at over 10 seconds... sometimes it beeps before i can see where the radar is... and i start wondering if it is a false alert, but sure enough up ahead is a box on the side of the road.

YMMV, but thats what i found. Of course, in 6 months time or a years time, this may all change... new models, revisions, etc. so the testing i did only applies for now.

**Crash** · 03-28-2005, 12:33 PM

The absolute best for photo radar is currently the BEL 975R, which you can get from Roy. I´m pretty content with my Valentine, but the remote installation reigns supreme in this case.

**pemarsh** · 03-28-2005, 12:43 PM

I am under the impression that photo radar snaps your speed and a picture of your lic plate. Why not just buy one of those lic plate covers, that distorts pictures of it?

**jimbonzzz** · 03-28-2005, 01:04 PM

ANother forum member, Ali-Gator, took video of his tests against the multanova. They got uploaded here:

http://davidson.smugmug.com/gallery/374874/1

In these test results, out of the non-remote detectors Valentine gave the best warning against the Multanova. The Target966 Euro (remote mount) gave the best warning by far though, and this is supposably the european version of the BEL 975R.

After these tests, a lot of people were wondering about this, since the 975R didn't do wall in Roy's tests at all. Maybe the 966 and 975 have the same hardware, but different software?

I was corresponding with someone about this. Here's what he actually sent me:

Hello. I don't know if you remember but we were investigating why the BEL 975R with Ka narrow On outperforms the X50, RX65 ... (roughly 800 feet versus 250 feet detection range) against the Multanova 6F.

In fact it seems that it's only a software trick that make the BEL 975R better because if you set the Ka narrow option to OFF, the BEL 975R is crappy again (150 feet detection range).

Moreover a guy in the Czech Republic was able to flash the BEL 980 eprom and to add the Ka narrow option to it. Once the Ka Narrow mode was set to on, The BEL 980 rocks like the BEL 975R. Otherwise the BEL 980 was "crappy".
So it seems to have nothing to do with the detector hardware.
Perhaps since the Multanova 6F is low-powered (0,5 mW), standard detectors consider its signal as background noise while scanning the whole Ka band.

I'm not exactly sure if the narrow option he is referring to is BEL's "Accusweep" or not, it almost sounds like it though. If that is the case, then this could be turned on in the RX-65 too (USA/Intl)...

I would definitely like to hear from anyone who knows anything more about this though...

Jim

**brick** · 03-28-2005, 02:01 PM

From owning a 975R I can tell you that it does break down the Ka band into four segments, each of which can be turned on or off individually. (Default is on, obviously.) So if you know where the Multinova operates you could turn off the other three parts of the band as they have it divided. I have to assume that this is what we're talking about doing.

**Crash** · 03-28-2005, 03:54 PM

Exactly. The Bel 915/975R and the Bel Target Europa/EVO 966R are superb at detecting Multanova photo radar. One more thing to add would be the positioning of the antenna. It has to be placed vertically. If you position if horizontally, the range reduces by over 30%. Something about the Multanova and Traffipax radars using vertical polarization, while radar detectors are using horizontal polarization. Maybe jimbonzzz would be better suited to answer this one.

**brick** · 03-28-2005, 04:37 PM

That information about vertical orientation must have been in the dutch that I couldn't read

. I figured there was a reason that they were putting everything on its side, including that Quintezz unit with the extended horn. I didn't know that that there was such a thing as polarization in radio signals in the first place. It begs the question, though, if that orientation would inadvertently attenuate signals from everything else?