Originally Posted by liquid_helix136

I used a V1 for a few years, and had it configured accordingly and my firmware was up to date, but it was still very noisy where I live, DFW area. The metroplex I live in is just full of false K and even KA, and I finally got to the point where I found myself ignoring nearly every alarm, even when they were true threats. There were multiple times that it would go off, I would hit silent, and then pass a bogey. That's when I realized it was time for a change.

As of about two years ago, I now use the Escort Passport Max and I love it. I was a BIG fan of the V1 and it's capabilities, but for my personal situation and environment, top of the line and accurate filtering is more important than sheer range and sensitivity. The passport series have the GPS lockout feature, which works incredibly well. If you pass a false alarm 3x in a row, it recognizes this and locks it out, silencing it for good, unless you unlock it manually. You can also manually lock out false alarms. This has SIGNIFICANTLY reduced the amount of false alarms I get. Now 95% of the time, if my radar is going off, its a true threat, especially if it is KA. The only thing I miss is the arrows, but I've kinda gotten over it.

Speaking of the arrows however, Valentine's patent on the arrow technology has expired, and Escort has come out with the Passport Max 360, which combines the two best features of the two leading companies, the arrows and dual band technology of the V1 and the GPS lockout of the Escort series. You can finally have both! ....At the price of ~$550. Tests show that the Passport 360's arrow system isn't up to par with the V1, but that's to be expected. Valentine has been making the same model for the past 25 years or so, and this is Passport's first model with dual band and directional technology.

Of note, I haven't looked in the last 6 months or so, but I believe Valentine has been making efforts in attempting to keep up with Escort as far as filtering out false alarms, and they may be better now than what I had experienced about 2 years ago.

As far as efficacy of both, I received 3 tickets in my 3-4 years of owning a V1, however they were all via Laser / instant-on radar. I have not received any tickets with my Passport Max. So I would say for me, they were equally effective. The passport is just a lot quieter

EDIT:
I just looked up prices, and you can get the Passport Max 360 for $550, the Passport Max for $350 and the Valentine 1 for about $500.

Originally Posted by windhund116

the Max 360 also has Bluetooth --- IPhone and Android connection feature. Does this mean you always need to have phone on and with you? And looking at the phone?
Or can you program radar detector from phone?

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Chuck S

Maybe with tropospheric scatter! Otherwise irritations like the curvature of the earth and the distance to the horizon mess things up.

-- Chuck