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Do you use one?

Are they worth the money?

yeah, if you know how to use them, they work great. mine has saved me many times over.

any recommendations? it seems like the great debate in the radar detector industry is that of the Escort Passport 8500 versus the Valentine One.

They are well worth it.

It has saved me from about 6-7 tickets now while being zapped... But on the flip side I probably would of only been speeding one of them times if I didnt have it....

Them are expensive ones. I bought a $100 one at walmart, good enough...

I have an Escort Passport 7400, and I am pretty happy with it. It doesn't have near as many false alarms as my old whistler did, and It saved me a few times driving from SC to OK last year. I kinda wish I would have gotten the 8500, but I don't know if it would have been worth the extra cash. Over all I love having a radar detector. I don't know how many times my whistler saved me, but i do know it paid for itself many times before the new guns started getting to advanced for it. I should be able to tell you more about my 7400 once I get home next week and get a chance to drive around with it some more.

I'm using an Escort 8500 X50 (blue) at present.
great detector. lets me know where the cops are.
http://www.radartest.com has an article about V1 vs Escort.
worth reading.

Escort vs. Valentine is a debate, but both are so good that you won't have trouble out of either. Well worth the money, it just you overconfident and you'll speed more. But it feels SO good to pass a cop after detecting his radar, you may as well be flipping him off :) .

wow, I had always thought that most people would regard radar detectors as a waste money. since the cheapest and most effective way to avoid tickets would be to keep off the gas pedal.. not to mention savings at the gas pump.

well thanks for the info KiKi, i'll be reading for a while

If you speed, you'll speed, you may as well get some equipment to reduce your chances of adding revenue to police departments. I personally have a hard time going 55mph, but I grew up on cars that didn't have A/C so 70-80mph with the windows down was regular for me, especially on a 100+ degree day with a high humidity level. You can get good gas mileage at higher speeds, you just have to build the car to do so. Usually a midrange cam and the equivalent intake/exhaust upgrades will get its best gas mileage closer to 70-80mph.

yeah, the highest mpg for my car occurs at around 65-70mph. but of course, the greater the difference between (low) RPM and (high) MPH, the greater the MPG.

in any event, after reading that article, it seems like the Valentine One is quite a bit 'worse' than the BEL and Escort. I really can't believe that V1 basically uses the same topology/design as when they first came out over 13 years ago.... But from other sites, ppl are raving about their superior performance.

so how is it possible that 13 year old technology can keep up with the latest advancements? aside from "extraneous" features such as auto-mute, user programming, etc...