u1000 red light warnings

[Strontium]

Hi all! Very close to buying one of these. One thing I see it has that I haven't seen a lot of info on in Australia is the red light/fixed speed camera warnings. How well do they work? Are they relatively up to date? Can you get these, but turn off some of the other annoying features such as lane departure?

 

[Peter_R]

1. You can turn off lane departure warnings. I found the beeping annoying so I turned that function off.
2. As far as the red light fixed speed camera warnings are concerned, I found they only used a common database used by others and was not kept up to date and was a bit of a workaround to load the data onto the u1000. I carried out a direct comparison by having them on at the same time as my Cheetah C550. See paragraph 3 below.
3. Many years ago (before I bought a u1000) I purchased 2 x Cheetah C550-speed camera alert systems (one for me and the other for my wife's car), that are updated on a regular basis. As well as in the UK, it is used worldwide including Australia and the US, etc, and features the widely used Trinity 3 speed camera database. The nice thing about this system is that in the UK (I don't know about Aus), is that also covers mobile speed camera locations, and users can and do pass on information about sitings and they are incorporated in the next Trinity 3 database iteration.
4. The Cheetah C550 has now been updated with a modified version that uses a mobile phone SIM card subscription to give up-to-date mobile speed camera locations. I have no experience with this mobile phone system. See link https://driveaware.app/
5. I note that the Cheetah C550 is discontinued as a new product, but there are many still around and the trinity 3 database is always up to date is still used by other organizations.

I hope this helps. Just remember this is an opinion and other users may vary.

 

[Strontium]

Well, I just bought 2 of these cameras. Need to pick up some add-a-fuses and install them. I hope I like them!

 

[Strontium]

To answer my own question, in case someone else is ever interested: it's actually pretty good. At 300m from the known red-light or speed camera it gives you a spoken warning, including the speed of the zone the camera is in. It even pays attention to which way you are driving and only warns on the correct direction. Eg. at a local red light/speed camera there is only a camera for one direction through the lights. It pays attention to which way you are going and only warns when going that way. Pretty good really.
Not sure about the regularity of the updates yet.

 

[Peter_R]

To answer my own question, in case someone else is ever interested: it's actually pretty good. At 300m from the known red-light or speed camera it gives you a spoken warning, including the speed of the zone the camera is in. It even pays attention to which way you are driving and only warns on the correct direction. Eg. at a local red light/speed camera there is only a camera for one direction through the lights. It pays attention to which way you are going and only warns when going that way. Pretty good really.
Not sure about the regularity of the updates yet.

That is the default setting. In the majority of cases with all hardware, this distance is user adjustable.

In the UK I found the updates were slow to be promulgated and of course, you have to download them onto a memory card and update the u1000 manually yourself.
Some users thought they were done automatically.