Do yourself a favor and invest in a V1. I think the best feature other then letting you know when you have activity. Is the fact hat it gives you the direction of the signal. I remember growing up my dad had one of those gray color thin escorts (80's-90's) traveling back and forth from Santa Fe to ABQ we would play the "where is he game" the sucker would go off a few times during the 50 mile trip. With the V1 you do not have to play that child's game LOL. Check out this new feature. Mike Valentine is a member on another board I frequent he had this to say about the new "Junk" feature. A $55 upgrade if you have the 1.8 version of the unit.
"A New Warning
V1 has a new feature. When the signal identification system determines that a current warning is not, in fact, a radar threat, it notifies you with a "dee-dah-doo" sound and terminates the warning. At the same time, the letter "J" will flash briefly in the Bogey Counter."
"J" stands for "J"unk signal.
OK, why did we add this new feature? Because it was the best way to give beyond-line-of-sight warning capability for POP-radar signals while not burdening the user with an excess of unresolved alerts (false alarms).
POP signals (click me) are short bursts of radar that last only some tens of milliseconds. They are made short in an effort to escape the notice of radar detectors. Simply speeding up the search process of a detector allows high probability-of-intercept for the POP transmissions but introduces another nasty problem -- microwave interference generated by radar detectors in other vehicles causing false alarms.
There are many hundreds of thousands of certain model BEL, Cobra, Radio Shack, and Uniden detectors that manage to transmit radar-like signals that mimic POP bursts to an infuriating degree. They litter the airwaves with interference bursts on the same, exact frequency as, and similar duration to, a real POP-radar signal. Without some way of fending off these "J"unk signals, a detector would constantly nag its user with false alarms from these poorly designed "poluters" in other cars.
The common method of reducing the number of false POP alarms used by our competition is to reduce the sensitivity to POP signals (and their Junk kin) while leaving longer-lasting (over half a second) signals unmolested. This method requires reducing POP-radar range to line-of-sight-only distances in order to give enough relief from detector-generated false alarms to be worthwhile. I wasn't satisfied with only line-of-sight range for POP radar reception, so we pushed for a better solution.
I did nearly 10,000 miles of development driving, dodging speed traps and logging false alarm situations, while our engineers reorganized and optimized the false alarm rejection methods we finally chose. After lengthy deliberations, we realized that it was almost impossible to prevent every POP-like false alarm without taking too large a hit in POP-radar over-the-hill range. I decided that letting in a few POP-junk false alarms initially that were later announced to be "J"unk was less of a problem than not finding out about a POP radar until too late. I hope you'll agree.
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My Z8 has LED rear lights and sets off Shank's V1 so incessantly that it needs to be turned off. This is a real problem especially with more and more manufacturers going with LED lights. There is no fix at all in the foreseeable future??
Lou
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Lou,
The Z8 actually has neon (not LED) lighting. AFAIK, there have never been any reported problems with LED tail lamp or CHMSL interference with a V1. LED lamp photon output is very slow rise-time (~100 microseconds) compared to a laser-gun pulse (a few nanoseconds) and is easily filtered out in V1's processing circuitry. And, more importantly, the spectral content of visible LED lamps has zero near-infrared spectral content. No near-IR, ... no interference! For these reasons, LED lamps are my favorite new technology for stop, turn and CHMSL lighting.
The neon interference comes from the fact that neon plasma has light emission spectral output in the near-infrared region as well as in visible wavelengths. Red color filters for neon tubes readily pass the near-infrared output as well as the red visible light. Yellow colored neon lamps have a phosphor coating that blocks the near-IR output from them.
And, the typical ignition source for neon is some sort of high-voltage pulsating power supply. The rise-time of the photon output is very fast (~10 nanoseconds), which easily mimics a laser-gun pulse.
Here's a quote from Automotive Industries on the future of neon in automotive lighting (from Jan., 2000 article).
"Neon, featured on the upcoming BMW Z8, competes with LED as another alternative for rear signal lighting, as well as front-of-vehicle applications. Recently, there has been interest among designers in neon CHMSLs, too. Like HID, neon uses gas and does not involve a filament. Lighting makers say it is unaffected by harsh temperatures, shock, or vibration.
Neon comes in tubes that are bendable and allow for design flexibility, and has a faster rise-time than traditional rear lights. It lends itself to applications in which a long, smooth strip is desired.
"Neon lights 200 milliseconds faster than incandescents, giving a following driver 24 feet of extra stopping distance at 65 mph," claims Tom Schottes, global market manager for automotive lighting at Osram Sylvania.
However, today's neon usage is minimal due to extremely high cost. Another downfall of neon is that like HID, it needs an electric ballast.
Federal-Mogul has designed a miniature neon capsule that glows like neon, but uses a different means of energizing gas in the capsule.
"We have been working on neon technology for many years," Jiao says. "There is no committed technology because system cost is not acceptable in a larger scale." He adds that neon is not going to be as widely, or as quickly accepted as LEDs."
So, LED use is growing and that is a good thing. Neon use seems to be waning, but it is already on the road in annoying numbers. We don't have a fix today, but it may be possible in the next few years.
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Originally posted by ebaker
I wonder if a neon light on the front of a car might "confuse" a laser gun?
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Probably not.
Laser guns use very narrow bandwidth infrared optical filters to reject "daylight noise" from the sun. They also reject a large portion of potential noise from vehicle headlights.
Unfortunately, neon does not have much spectral energy on exactly the 904 nanometer wavelength used by the laser gun optics. I assume that neon jamming of the laser gun would be largely ineffective because virtually none of its infrared output would travel the past the optical filter.
We can't use that same optical filtering to reject neon CHMSLs(even if we could afford it, which is doubtful) because it only works correctly for an extremely narrow field of view -- less than a few degrees. A laser detector needs a field of view many times greater than the laser gun, so the optically-narrow diffraction grating filters aren't of much use to our side of the war.
Oh well ...
