Mini-Review: Three Cordless Radar Detectors
Battery-powered detectors constitute a fairly small piece of the market, but as an automotive journalist, I use them constantly.
That's partly due to the lousy ergonomics of many new vehicles. Cigarette smoking is now actively discouraged by the automakers, many of whom refuse to provide cigarette lighters. Substituted are power points, perfectly okay with me, but whose locations appear to be determined as an afterthought.
Recently I drove a Pontiac Solstice, for instance. The sole 12-volt power point is at the left bottom of the center stack. But I wanted to install a Garmin Nuvi satnav system, cellphone car cord and a radar detector. Using a three-way splitter, I got everything installed and operating.
But the car couldn't be driven. The mass of cords draped themselves over the primary controls and worse, on the very first shift from second to third, my knuckles slammed into the splitter and power plugs dangling in front of the shift lever.
The solution was to unplug the satnav and rely instead on its battery; the cellphone cord was packed away and in lieu of the corded detector, a cordless model was affixed to the windshield. Problem solved.
That's the beauty of a cordless detector. A secondary benefit is the ease of pulling it from the windshield and putting it out of sight when parking. We've had corded detectors stolen, but never a cordless.
The roster of cordless models list-priced under $200 is short: only three models. So we gathered one of each and tested them. We were particularly scrutinizing their radar detection range, a chronic shortcoming in many cordless units.
That's because cordless models typically have a duty cycle, shutting off for milliseconds-long periods to extend battery life. The downside to this energy-conserving strategy is lower sensitivity.
Tested: the PNI RX7500 Silver Bullet, PNI RW3000 Steel Eye and the Whistler 1788. Here's what we found, listed alphabetically and each one rated 1-5 stars with 5 being the highest.
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