Valentine One - V1 Radar Detector Review

Some have criticized the Valentine One as being heavy and bulky. I personally care for its solid construction, although it's lighter than other more streamlined appearing detectors. Valentine's convey a sense of being chisled out of billet steel (actually the case is magnesium).

Whenever I see a Valentine One mounted in the windshield of another vehicle, I know the driver is a serious one. When I drive with the Valentine One, I notice I tend to get followed/flogged more by would-be freeloaders on my tail than with any other detector. There is a reason for this and I understand the desire of Valentine owners to want to hide their detector from view with the optional remote display.

Shortcomings? Sure. A couple of minor ones. I still struggle with the suction cups losing adhesion (it seems to alway be one or the other) from time to time. An automuting capability would be nice or at least a push button (a la Bel/Escort) on the power adaptor to spare me the reach to the windshield every time it goes off in city driving and its bogey counter counts up to 7 when I pass a shopping area. And to be completely honest, I have come to like the additional display capability of either the Beltronics and Escort top models - primarily to see what radar band frequency is the source of the alerting (Ka has three distinct ones, 33.8ghz, 34.7ghz, 35.5ghz). The ability to separate POP detection from the J[unk] filtering function would also be nice along with an ability to quickly reset programmed settings back to factory default as one can do with the Beltronics and Escort radar detectors.