my V1 completely missed a Multanova on EURO mode *WITHVIDEO*

[Dilip]

Oh, and .....actually i am not complaining about the range, i get sufficient range.

The problem is sometimes when the radar unit is out of tune, the v1 completely misses it and does not alert at all, however, an X50 on the other hand might still give u 1 or 2 seconds of alert, (which is almost useless)

[brick]

I assume you have tried the orientation along with turning off Euro? If it still makes no difference, that's disappointing. Sounds like there really is nothing you can do unless they can widen the narrow-band sweep a bit. It's that or find a way to get you more gain so that the wideband Ka sweep does the job. (Increasing gain a pet project of mine, but very much in its infancy.)

I used Babelfish to decipher maybe ~60% of the dutch. I could more or less figure out what was going on without it but the translator will help with some of the details. It reads like ass, though.

[Carlos from Spain]

Hi Dilip,

The problem is that the Bel975 will not pick up those decalibrated Multanovas because they are out of the manufactures specs. All detectors made for the Multanova are also aprox +/-100MHZ of the 34,3GHz, becuase this is the correct working frecuenciers of the Multanova. RThe more you open up that frecuency scan on the detector the more performance you are going to loose. If its working outside this range you will have the same problem with any other narrow Ka band detector. The only reason the X50 picks it up is because it sweeps the whole Ka band up to the 36GHz with its superwide ka, the trade off is that the warning distances are very poor and you are likely to get a ticket on the long run from a multanova. So setting the V1 on superwide would vbe a worse trade off.

Maybe the problem will fix itself since the radars have to pass routing recalibrations (depending on coutrty may be once a year for example) and that Multanova would be fixed then. Also, if the V1 does not pick it up, then its working outside manufacturer specs so in theory the tickect is not legal since the radar is not calibrated. But the problem is proving it, first thing to do if you get a tickect is to ask for the calibartion inspection certificate of the radar to see if its up to date.

Otherwise I don't see a solution :?

[o2bad455]

But u see......u guys are missing the point. there's nothing wrong with the V1. It can detect 90% of the multanova's with enough range for me, approx 100-150 meters. However, the problem is that some radars in HK are not tuned properly, they fall far out from the specs that they are supposed to, which means that The V1, or even the Bel 975R will NOT detect it because they all have a fixed +/- 100 mhZ threshold on detecitng the multanova frequency of 34.36ghz.

Why not just take it out of Euro mode so it will cover the whole Ka range? Turn off any other bands that you don't need manually. It should at least pick them all up that way, although optimal detection range might suffer.

[o2bad455]

You're not running both the V1 and X50 at once, are you? If you were, the X50 would definitely cut the range of the V1 due to interference, and the V1 would probably do the same to the X50. You should do all final testing (and general use) one at a time.

[f_399]

You're not running both the V1 and X50 at once, are you? If you were, the X50 would definitely cut the range of the V1 due to interference, and the V1 would probably do the same to the X50. You should do all final testing (and general use) one at a time.

i think he sold the x50

[Carlos from Spain]

Why not just take it out of Euro mode so it will cover the whole Ka range? Turn off any other bands that you don't need manually. It should at least pick them all up that way, although optimal detection range might suffer.

Thats the problem, the detection range. If you open up to the whole superwide the detection range suffers considerably, too much to be worthwhile. The reason is because the Multanova emits at much much lower power outputs than normal superwide Ka radars, and is often place facing the rear of the cars, so as you approach them you can only get a warning if you catch a rebound before you reach it. This makes them very difficult to detectma dn if you make the detector scann, process and filter the whole 1.6GHzs wide superwide Ka band intead of a short 0.2GHz Ka band the detction range suffers considerably.

This also depends on the country, but in Spain for example a detector in sueprwide is close to useless, in most of the fixed multanovas you would get warning only after you have passed ita and flashed. But in other countries like Australia they have them set up on full power so even with a superwide detector you get reasonalble detection ranges. But this does not seem to be the case for HK wre Dilip is.

[o2bad455]

I understand your point about the range versus sweep problem. It sure would be nice if VR offered us an optional way to actually specify the desired sweep(s). What would happen if ONLY the Ka band was swept (remove all X, Ku, and K too), and Ka false filtering was OFF so as not to waste processing time? I might even try turning off POP so it wouldn't spend any extra time on 33.8.

[Carlos from Spain]

Unfortunalely decativating Ku and K band (the other bands in Euro mode) would not make much differnce since they are narrow bands, in real life the difference is negligeable in most situations.

Also for some reason the performance loss of activating a second narrow Ka band (for example in the Bel975R which has 4 narrow Ka bands) is more than activating Ku or K band, maybe due to the proximity. But deactivating Ku o K does not change things much.

There is no POP in Europe so no european detector has this, and I believe its OFF as default in the V1 in Euro Mode.

I can't comment on the Ka false filtering feature since I have not tested this personally, but the other narrow band detectors do not have this and suffer performance loss in superwide vs narrow just the same.

The only solution would be as you mentioned, to be able to select the width of the sweep.

[Dilip]

Hello

Carlos and others, thanks so much for your comments.

Using it on superwide is out of the question. The reason i switched over from the X50 to the V1 was so that i can use narrow band. On supwerwide mode, the V1 is even worse than the X50, but a considerable margin. Turning off superwide would in some instances result in detection of the radar only when i am parallel to it, which is too late. But with euro mode, when it does detec the multanova, i've always had plenty of detection time to slow down if i'm not over 140 km/h.

Carlos, what concerns me, is that this out of tune multanova i encountered, is not the same one as last time when i went testing with nvr2fast. It's in a different location! I guess the best solution is if Valentine could increase the scaning range to +/- 150mhz instead of 100 mhz only, but they're not going to do that anytime soon.

I highly doubt my V1 is out of tune. Two reasons:
1. Its only 2 months old.
2. If it does fall out of tune, according to the tech at Valentine, it will end up going slightly down in the mhz range, meaning it would actually improve my chances of picking up the out of tune radars since they operate down on 34.200 ghz. Valentine said radar detectors will only fall downwards out of tune, and never upwards.

The pop on euro mode is on by default, i have it turned off. I also have KU band and K band off. I also have the KA filter turned off.

o2bad455: No i am not running them both at once. Although......when i did testing with my friend, i confirmed by using multiple runs, that using them both together will NOT decrease performance on either model. I have tried runing together, and single, on the same radar and we got same range. I believe its because X bands are off on both radars. Jimbonzz once said X bands cause inteference on KA band or something.

Carlos:
Any other solution u can offer? Fighting a ticket would be useless in HK i think..... Is it possible there is something wrong with my V1? It's a big hassle for me to send it in. The VR tech said its highly unlikely anything is wrong, since it can detect all other multanova's just fine.