Radar Detectors

Whistler DE1650 Whistler DE1650 Radar Detector I bought this detector about two or three months back because of the price and also because I liked what I read on...

either bad luck or bad quality. Whistler DE1650 Radar Detector I am one of those people who like to push the speed limit and try not to get cought. I bought the Whistler 1650 to...

When I bought this radar detector I had little time to really look around. I was leaving for a road trip and only had a few minutes to shop. This detector had all the features and I decided that if it doesn’t work out I’ll just return it when I get back. And return it I did.

Right out of the box the suction cups did not work. One of them would stick the other kept falling off (yes I do know how to use suction cups :)) Even if they did work I don’t think I could keep the detector on the windshield because the display was impossible to read. Its more than bright enough if you look at it inside the car, but if any amount of sunlight hits the display, it becomes completely unreadable and useless. The cord for the detector is nowhere near long enough to put the detector high up on the windshield (my cigarette adapter is pretty low down). It does reach but there is quite a bit of tension on the cord.

For these three reasons I ended up mounting it to the dash which I didn’t really want to do because I have to stick things to my car and because my dash isn’t high enough for the detector to completely clear the wipers, but I had no choice here. BTW, the sticky stuff was no longer sticking to the detector after a few days and the thing was twisting all over the place (helped by the tension on the cord.) That actually was the final draw. A detector pointing sideways is definitely pretty useless.

As far as operation goes there were few false alarms (although it might have been because the detector was blocked by the wipers). I didn’t run into many speed traps on the trip so testing was limited. It did work of course, but I have no information on ranges, speed of laser detection, capabilities of the 360 degree lens (usually those are next to useless since laser is almost always a sure kill anyway and the backward looking lenses are fairly insensitive), etc.

I do have a complaint about having to turn on VG2 every time I turn on the detector. I can’t understand the logic behind doing so. Yes VG2 is illegal in a few places but either turn it on by default or provide memory to keep the setting. This isn’t a setting most people need to change often so having the batter save feature is no excuse here (the excuse would be that there is no power to maintain settings), just write the setting into non-volatile memory, there is no need to have much of it. VG-2 may seem like a pretty useless feature in states where detectors are legal but it isn’t. Often times police will use radar detection along-side with pulse radars (these turn on instantly and take a reading so there is little or no warning) thus VG-2 can be another way for you to find speed traps and avoid some pulse-radar tickets.

So in short I had a pretty horrible experience with this detector. I think some problems were just bad luck, but I consider enough of them to be the result of inadequate engineering to give this product a very low rating.

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Tags: legal, Whistler

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