Yahoo News In Memory of Mike Valentine, a Pioneer of the Radar Detector Industry
Mike Valentine looked like a prototypical engineer from the Sixties. Button-down dress shirt, pressed slacks, clean-cut appearance—at least he didn't have a pocket protector. But he was also technically creative, unusually dedicated, and had instinctive business sense. More important, he was our kind of guy because he loved cars and driving fast, and he wanted to help everyone else of the same mind.
When Mike graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in electrical engineering in the mid-Seventies, America was a couple of years into the despised "Double Nickel," the 55-mph national speed limit, imposed to conserve fuel after the Arab oil embargo of 1973.
In most states, the primary tool for speed enforcement was a radar gun used to measure speed. A variety of consumer radar detectors had come on the market in response to this ticket threat.
After graduation, Mike was working for an electronics parts distributor, according to his close friend Mike Jaeger, another UC EE graduate and car enthusiast. "I had a '63 Corvette and Mike had an MGB that he liked to drive fast on Ohio's back roads," he told us.
"Mike was selling some parts to Electrolert, which manufactured the then popular Fuzzbuster. We took one apart and were amazed at how primitive it was. There was almost nothing inside. Mike and I started noodling about how to build a superior, cost-no-object detector.
"Mike took it to Fuzzbuster thinking he could sell them more parts, but they turned it down because it would have been too expensive to build and sell. So Mike came to me and suggested that we make it ourselves. We were a good team, with Mike very good at signal processing, while I was good at the radio frequency technology," Jaeger said.
That was the birth of Cincinnati Microwave, which debuted its Escort detector in 1978. Not only did this device contain the sophisticated electronics designed by Mike and Jim, but the technology was housed in a clean, tidy package with innovations such as a signal-strength meter. Steve Jobs would have approved.
When we tested 12 radar detectors in the February 1979 issue, the Escort's performance completely outclassed the other detectors—except for one. The Fuzzbuster II matched the Escort's performance, despite not claiming to have the Escort's advanced superheterodyne receiver. We were suspicious enough to take the unit apart and found that it contained the guts of an Escort stuffed into the Fuzzbuster box.
CM was building about 100 detectors per month, but after our test appeared, the company was swamped with orders and despite ramping up production, it took them some seven months to catch up.
"Mike was more than clever," said Jim. "He would come up with things that no one else had ever thought of, even though they seemed obvious afterward. But Mike was the one who had the ideas."
One example was reorienting the antenna on the Escort. Paul Allen, a very early employee and UC mechanical engineering graduate, explains. “Mike came in one day and said that when driving his wife, Peggy's, BMW 2002, he noticed that his Escort would detect a particular false alarm earlier than when driving his Porsche 928.
"The most obvious difference was the windshield angle, but we thought that since glass is transparent to radar signals it shouldn't make a difference. But we bought a piece of laminated windshield glass, tested it, and found to our surprise that it did. But by rotating the antenna in the detector by 90 degrees, which required major redesign, we solved the problem. It wasn't a huge difference, but it was beneficial because the steeper windshields tended to be on higher-performance cars, which needed radar protection more than sedans with upright glass."
Unfortunately, by 1983, business disagreements caused Jim to buy Mike's share of the company. Mike walked away with several million dollars—and a five-year non-compete agreement. In his early thirties, Mike could have easily settled into an indolent retirement, but he was too energetic and inquisitive for that.
Motivated perhaps by his desire to import some non-EPA-compliant cars from Europe, he developed an electronics box that helped recalibrate engines to allow them to be made legal.
Then he developed a product focused on driving enthusiasts called the g-analyst. It used a two-axis accelerometer—developed in house—to measure and record cornering, braking, and acceleration around a track (C/D, July 1987). You could use it to compare your performance to other drivers on the same circuit and see where you were slower or faster. Though primitive compared with modern racing recorders, it was the best tool available in the day, though not a commercial success due to a highly limited market.
Valentine One
Once his non-compete expired, Mike formed Valentine Research and designed a new detector called the Valentine One. A key innovation was a set of front and rear antennas to determine whether the radar was ahead or behind the driver. And with police radar having expanded to several new bands from the original X and K, and the deployment of instant-on radar, the V1 incorporated signal processing that allowed very rapid scanning of the bands. Combined with Mike's never-ending focus on radar sensitivity, the V1—now in its second generation—is regarded as the most sensitive detector on the market.
Cincinnati not being far from Ann Arbor, Mike came to our offices many times to present his products, and we got to know him. When you got the product briefing straight from the guy who designed it, and who tested his designs on his ever more exotic Porsches, including a Carrera GT and a 918, it tended to be convincing. Especially when the products always measured up to the promises.
During the dark decades of the double-nickel, Mike's products helped make our driving lives much better. He was also a major supporter of his Cincinnati community, leading to the establishment of the Margaret and Michael Valentine Center for Dance and the renovation of the Fifth Third Arena. In appreciation of the UC engineering library that he consulted extensively during his early days at Cincinnati Microwave, he created a fund for the engineering library to enhance its resources.
Mike died suddenly at 75 and is survived by Margaret (Peggy), his wife of 51 years, as well as two daughters and two grandchildren.
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