I keep the volume of my radar detector all the way down. I don’t need it when riding around city streets and can’t hear it at freeway speeds given that I always wear earplugs. When riding around the SF Bay Area I mainly ignore the detector; it’s on mainly because I’m too lazy to turn it off.
That leads to the bad habit of ignoring the detector when perhaps I should be paying attention. I tried the in helmet HARD unit, but didn’t like that I couldn’t hit a button kill the warnings. I sold the HARD unit and thought I’d give the Marc Parnes Visual Alert a try. So far I’m happy with it.
GS Cockpit
Deciding where to put the Visual Alert was the hardest part of the installation. Since I have my GPS out of the way yet pointing at my eyes I figures this would be a good spot for the Visual Alert. Plus, it let me put the V1 external audio control (needed to use the Visual Alert with the V1) where I can easily control it to stop the flashing.
The rest of the installation was a simple matter of removing plastic, cutting cable ties, re-routing wires, then installing new cable ties.
Visual Alert close-up
V1 Audio Control
The Visual Alert is velcro-ed to the top of my GPS and the audio control velcro-ed inside my left hand guard. The audio control doesn’t get in the way of clutch operations, yet is in a great location to easily disable the Visual Alert if it annoys me. A quick push on the volume knob silences the current alert. Turning the volume to minimum disables the unit.
I’ve only put a few hundred miles on the bike since installing the unit. So far it is living up to expectations. The only down side is that I’ve not yet trained myself to look at the radar detector when the alert starts flashing. I tend to look at the alert, first. Dumb. I know that it’s flashing and there’s no further information to be gleaned by looking at the LEDs.
Later: I gave up on radar detectors and lost the need for the Visual alert. I got tired of being notified as to the location of every shopping center and the CHP did not need radar to catch me in the one moving violation I’ve received on the GS.