Article: Affordable Radar Detector Testing - 3/15/2015

[Vortex]

My Stalker II was 11 or 12mw when I got it 3yrs ago & have no idea what it is today.

Were you able to measure that yourself or was it on the certification documentation? It'd be fun to test that out manually and not have to send it out.

The majority of the time in use it's w/ the +12v cord when Testing to ensure max power out so it's within 3db of its big brother the DSR to near duplicate State Patrol (for detection distance purposes when testing friend's RDs) agencies using the DSR in NewEngland States.

That's a good idea. Battery life on these units is pretty excellent and while I assume that the output power on battery should be comparable to a power cable, I have no way of verifying that. Skimming through the documentation, I see no mention of output power being dependent upon the power source.

One day I would like to see you report on absolute max range (flat road) for all of the above you are using on for cars only, not Semi trucks. I believe the DSR can do almost 2mi.

The terrain that we have here isn't conducive to those sorts of tests. In fact it's one reason why I love seeing other people's tests where they have long flat straightaways. It's all curves, hills, and trees here. Finding a straightaway of even a mile or so typically requires driving way out of the way, and even then you have other cars which'll be driving around and so I won't be able to test the full length of the course to test out maximum range. So there's some tests that I can do here and some that are tough at best. It sounds like that may be a test that you'd be able to conduct more easily than I would.

I think we've flogged your 34.7 short distance results w/o reaching any conclusive answer I'm afraid.

haha, well while I've seen detection range against Stalker be just fine in other tests which would lead me to believe there's not something wonky about this unit in particular, I really appreciate you also taking a look at the different possibilities and variables that could be leading to these results *independent of* the sensitivity of the RD's. It's something that's absolutely critical to testing and I love that other people may think of possibilities that never crossed my mind. It's kind of like open source radar detector testing.