gjw@clyde.UUCP (Gregory J. Wroclawski) (01/31/85)
The following is an excerpt of the news article I submitted to the net on DECEMBER 17th: **************************************************************************** On November 7th I had placed an order for a Passport to replace my stolen Escort. At that time I was told that my unit would be shipped on December 10th. This past weekend I received a letter from Cincinnati Microwave that my unit would not be shipped any time in the near future. To maintain customer rapport they are sending out a package of a full color brochure and the Passport owners manual to all people on their order list. Since, it was obvious that my unit was not shipped on the promised date I called their toll free number to find out the whole story. Now they are indicating that my unit is to be shipped on February 3rd !. I was told that they were taking orders for the units at the rate of about a thousand a day since the middle of October... . . ******************************************************************************** January 25th: Well this past weekend I finally received my unit. It certainly is a marvel of packaging creativity. The unit was shipped Federal Express on January 25th so the deliveries are running about a week and a half ahead of schedule. All the familiar features that made the Escort an outstanding detector are in the Passport plus a Dark/Mute switch. The Dark mode kills all visual indicators except for the green pilot lamp (somewhat disappointing). The Mute position is a momentary position which defeats the audible alert for the duration of the current radar encounter but leaves all visual indicators active. This is very nice since with my Escort I would turn the volume down and later forget to turn it back up. The LED bar graph is much easier to glance at than the Escort analog meter. The brightness of the alert lamp, bar graph and pilot lamp all vary with the ambient light. From the serial number of my unit it seems that they have built and shipped over 37,000 Passports so their claim of taking that many orders seems plausable. I plan on doing a side by side Passport vs. Escort performance comparison using a late model Escort to see if any performance was sacrificed in the repackaging. I will post the results to the net when they are in. Happy Motoring, Greg Wroclawski