sorry if this subject has been talked about, I kinda wanted to tell my story about my first ticket though...

so I'm driving home from the dentist office after an unscheduled visit on a snow day (you'll see why this will come back to bite me in the ***), and I see this 3 way intersection where almost everybody in town rolls thru, so I decided to give it a shot since nobody was around, or so I thought <insert corny horror movie music> dropped into second, and proceeded to see how fast I could go in my dad's '92 camry dx. i got thru 2nd gear at 50 mph and into 3rd to get an extra 10 mph for a grand total of 60 mph...wait a minute, wtf? I started to slow down for a bridge, I looked in my rear view to see red and blue lights. luckily, he didn't catch me on radar, so he gave me a citation for blowing the stop sign (<- stupid) and trav. too fast for conditions (<really fking stupid). @207 was the grand total, which no, mommy and daddy didn't pay for me. its been a month since it happened, and parents' rule says I have to wait another 5 til I can drive freely again. Oh, by the way, that was within a week of getting my liscense.

back to the point of my thread...what are your thoughts on a good radar detector under $320? I've been leaning toward an escort 8500 or escort solo s2, but I want the forum's opinion before i blow that amount of money on it. Any help is appreciated--thanks

oh, by the way, this ticket also means that any hope of getting a 3z has been lost. Best case scenario---i get a good condition 240sx se fastback (at least its rwd) w/ the 2.4L in it...

 

That's why if you get pulled over, you just throw it under the seat. My parents used to do it all the time, and it's passed down to me. I never leave home without my detector. Wow don't I just sound cliche commerical like.

 

thanks everybody...
I hate not being able to trust websites for accurate info, which is why i come here...the site i've been using to get info on radars detectors is this one:
http://www.radar-detectors.com/suppo...ct-tests/6.asp
this testor claims the escort series the best, and has actual testing results...aka ranges, but then looking at the valentine one website, they claim that it "looks" all around the vehicle in order to detect bacon <haha> I don't know which one to trust...
dom'sgarage, you said solo2, right? do you have it? and if so, has it detected cops behind, and to the side of you as well? to me, it doesn't really make sense that the escort series doesn't protect all around the car, but maybe that's just me. If you know why this is (if it's true), please enlighten me.
again, all replies are great, thanks a lot

 

I've just been doing a little more research, mainly because $400+ seems like a shtload of cash, when I'm currently unemployed, so I just took a look at radartest.com, which has Bel 980 rated first, escort 8500 2nd, and I think valentine 1 4th or something like that. does anyone have the Bel series detector? also I'm still wondering about this "around the whole car protection"

coming home from church today <I got to drive > I saw these cops stting in a parking lot near the church where a lot of the parishiners like to cut across to avoid the light. F-CK THEM. I cannot believe that they'd try to catch a bunch of religious people going home from church. The more I think about it, the more I despise them, which is why I need a radar detector

I'm going to try to find the price of the bel, I gotta make a decision, the dmv just sent me a notice saying that I'll hafta take a "Operator's Retraining" Course if I get another ticket.

 

sorry about the repeated posts fellas, but I was looking at radar-detectors.com again and saw that they did in fact test for radars coming from the back, and escort 8500 did pick all three bands up at 1000' +; although it doesn't tell me where the alert is coming from, like the v1 does, it'll give me an alert so I can stop driving like a d-ck until the alert goes away

 

this is another website, the radartest.com page showing the bestof 2003 or something...
http://radartest.com/article.asp?articleid=1064
escort 8500 - 97
bel 980 - 94
valentine 1 - 77

any thoughts?