Radar Detectors

Bel vs. Escort I don’t think so Beltronics BEL 950 Radar Detector Bel and Escort have been arch rivals for decades. Now it appears that they are the same company somehow. In any ev...

Escort Passport 6800 Radar Detector Key FeaturesDetection Mode:City / Highway modesDetection Area:FrontVG-2/VG-3 Alert:Without ...

First of all let me make it clear that my personal standards are radar and laser detection range, I don’t care at all what the other features on a detector are. I have owned the Escort Passport 6800 for about seven years, since it eclipsed the previous model (4500? I am not sure) and just as the 7500 was released. Having only previously owned two department-store quality Whistlers (I don’t recall the model numbers, but they were in the $75 range), those were my only standards of comparison when I bought this unit. And the 6800 did indeed deliver blistering performance compared to the old Whistlers. A couple years later a friend and I did a side-by-side test of the 6800 with what was then a $100 Uniden detector, and once more the 6800 detected every signal much before the Uniden did.

Fast forward to today, September, 2003. I work in law enforcement so I have no need for a radar detector, but my fiance still has the 6800 in her car. The other day she mentioned being interested in a Passport 8500 based on what she had seen in magazine ads. I am hesitant to recommend her spending $300 without just cause, so I decided to take the ol’ 6800 out for a spin and compare it to detectors that friends of mine owned just to see how up-to-date its performance is. A quick check of eBay revealed brand new 6800s in the packages selling for well under $100. Hmm…is that a warning?

OUR UN-SCIENTIFIC TEST RESULTS:

We used a stretch of relatively straight, unpopulated suburban “back road” with a speed of about 40MPH and handheld radar units by MPH Industries (X band) and Decatur Electronics (K and Ka bands).

The 6800 consistently was able to detect steady X band signals at about 1 mile away, while K and Ka were about 3/4 of a mile away. My fiance, our friends, and I took turns being drivers and radar operators and we all felt the results were similar. I did not have access to a lidar unit to test laser range.

To put it in a nutshell, the 6800 was better than or on close par with most modern low- to mid-priced detectors. The only model we tested that outdid the 6800’s performance was the remote mounted Uniden LRD7100R, being able to detect both a steady K band and Ka signal about two seconds before the 6800 did on each band. Traveling at about 40MPH, that would be about 120 feet sooner. With X band the performance was about the same.

We did side-by-side tests with detectors mounted on the windshield of a silver 2003 Chevy Impala. Caveat emptor: the 6800 was falsing on Ka band when put in close proximity to any Whistler detector. I don’t know what kind of warning that may generate on the road. The two units had to be on absolute opposite ends of the windshield to get the 6800 to stop beeping.

The Whistler DE1790 that my neighbor owns delivered nearly identical performance to the 6800, albeit only one to one and a half seconds later on every warning.

A Whistler DE1655 was impressive for the cheap price that a friend has paid for it ($50), but detected K and Ka band signals much worse than the other two previously mentioned detectors. X band performance was about four to five seconds later than the 6800, but still quick enough so that the driver had time to slow before coming into radar range. Two Cobra units, the ESD6060 and 9100, lagged so far behind the 6800 that we gave up after only one run with each.

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Tags: 8500, cheap, Cobra, Escort, remote, Uniden, Whistler

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