Great Detector in this price range

I have had my old Uniden radar detector for almost 14 years before it died a little while ago. Since it was so long ago and Uniden doesn't appear to exist anymore, I tried to do as much research as I could before buying a new one. I highly recommend checking out the following websites.

Great user forum on radar detectors:
http://www.radardetector.net

Good general overview on what to look for in a radar including links to sites that test radars:
http://www.buyradardetectors.com/blog/2006/02/what_to_look_for_in_a_radar_detector_1.aspx


What I generally found was the best rated radars (eg Escort Passport X50, Bel RX65, and Valentine 1) run about $300+ and the cheaper radars (including many of the Cobras) were rated very poorly. I was not in the market to spend $300+ but wanted something decent. I have only had the XTR-560 for about 3 weeks now but I can say it has been great. The other day I got an X band reading from a cop at the end of the street facing a different direction which was more than enough warning.

The unit itself is great, nice blue backlit display with many settings. All the text is customizable so you can change the display from HIGHWAY to whatever you want it to say. I personally hate the voice alert and this detector allows you to turn that feature off. Also if you don't like the factory alert tones you can record your own. It also comes with interchangeable (blue and pink) rings for appearance but that was not a selling point to me at all. The cord it comes with is a straight cigarette lighter adapter and not the coiled cord if you care about that but I did not as mine is hardwired to the fuse box.

All in all I would say the performance has been great. Picking up mostly real signals with very few false alerts except I seem to get a lot of apparent false VG2 alerts and an occasional Ku alert even though every thing I have read says Ku band is not used in the USA at all. But the nice feature is if this occurs you can manually turn off any band you want. This is important for people who live in areas where X band is not used by police since X band give the most false alerts from large stores. Unfortunately for me X band is used by police primarily around where I live so I will likely get more false alerts that others may. All in all I would rate this as an excellent product that is easy to use and easy to customize for a reasonable price of @ $130. I would certainly recommend the Whistler XTR-560.

Update: November 20, 2006
I have had this detector for about 4 months now and I am still very happy with it's performance. I am getting very few false alarms and have been warned quite early many times on police radar guns. But I felt it was important to mention the one thing that I find annoying. If you live in a hot climate like I do in North Carolina, and you like to leave your radar detector in the windshield the sun heats the detector and the LCD display becomes distorted and almost illegible. So far it has always returned to normal after the detector cools down and I have not had this problem lately as the temperatures have dropped significantly. But if that is a concern I would avoid radar detectors with LCD displays or be sure to not leave it in the hot car.