I’m pretty satisfied with my Beltronics RX65 radar detector. I’ve had it since March and it has served me rather well so far, helping me avoid quite a few speed traps. Granted, I did get two tickets while using this detector, but that was due to the police using LIDAR, which no radar detector in the world will help you spot in advance.
However, there is one thing that bothers me about the RX65. It seems that, if the unit gets hot, it will start to make a constant (and very annoying) noise followed by a message on the LCD that reads “Service Required”. With the Texas heat in full swing, I find myself getting out of the car for a quick trip through a store, only to find my radar detector screaming bloody murder once I get back to the car.
Granted, there is a really easy solution to this problem: just turn the damn thing off on your way out of the car. I tend to forget about this quite a bit, so I frequently return to an angry radar detector. I’ve also learned that “Service Required” does not necessarily mean that service is required. When this happens, I simply turn off the radar detector, remove it from the mount, and hold it against an A/C vent for about 2 minutes. That always fixes it.
Even with this annoying issue, I still recommend the RX65 to anyone who’s looking for a top of the line radar detector. Great unit, relatively cheap, has very nice features — can’t go wrong with the RX65, as long as you remember to turn it off on your way out of the car!
I recently made some changes to phone and Internet service at home. Since AT&T U-Verse does not require a regular phone line like my DSL did, I chose to move our phone number over to ViaTalk VoIP. I signed up for the ViaTalk’s service about two weeks ago, while they were having a “buy one year, get the second year free” promotion. The total cost for 2 years of service came out to about $240, with shipping and equipment and everything else.
The service itself is excellent, except for a problem I have with the way the Linksys PAP2 adapter is set up. The Linksys adapter they sent me hooked up to my network without any problems — however, for some reason it set itself up with DMZ access, which forwarded all incoming traffic to the Linksys unit. This means that anyone accessing http://myipaddress was able to view the configuration of my PAP2, including my full name and phone number. This is, in my opinion, a big security issue since so many sites log your IP address.
Fixing this was not a big deal, though. I simply disabled DMZ for the PAP2, assigned it an IP address, and forwarded a few ports to the unit. Call quality was not affected by this — as a matter of fact, call quality is spectacular even when I’m maxing out my connection by downloading off of usenet, or uploading to one of my servers via FTP.
Another small headache is that I’m still working on making Houston’s 311 service work with ViaTalk, but this should be a pretty simple fix. I just need to get some pointers on the configuration of the PAP2. A few changes to the dial plan should make 311 work just fine.
The last concern I had about VoIP was 911 service and overall reliability. ViaTalk offers E-911 service, so that all 911 calls are routed through to the proper call center. After setting up my 911 address in the control panel on ViaTalk’s site, I did a test call to 911 and verified that it does reach the Houston Emergency Center, which handles dispatching of Houston Police, Fire, and EMS. Reliability should be just fine, too. If the power goes out the VoIP adapter and my cordless phone are both hooked up to a battery backup system, which should be able to keep them going until utility power is restored.
I highly recommend ViaTalk for phone service. The savings are spectacular when compared to traditional telco service – 2 years of ViaTalk service cost $240 whereas 2 years of AT&T POTS service would have run us about $950. Woot for ViaTalk.
My 1.5 year old Belkin UPS died about a month ago. As it was on its way out, the UPS decided that I should probably think about replacing one of my routers as well, so an old Linksys 802.11b router died right along with the UPS. I opened a claim with Belkin and promptly sent in my dead UPS, thinking that they’ll probably just tell me to go elsewhere since the unit was close to going out of warranty. I was pleasantly surprised when I came home today to a UPS-delivered Belkin box sitting in front my door. Belkin replaced the dead UPS with a brand new 550VA unit and sent a $39.99 check as well, to cover the dead router.
How can you go wrong with that? Belkin kicks ass!
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