I'm thinking I would try to power the detector with the 12v cord and disconnect the mirror harness to see if it's the mirror leaking or the camera...I suspect it's just the camera.

 

When I picked the truck up, I had it mounted on the lower windshield with suction cups and powered it from the USB port. I had the same problem.
Your sure would think the Corvette would do it since it has higher tech gadgets.

 

It's a strange problem for sure. Not sure it's the camera, as cameras only receive light, not transmit on any frequency. I would think it more likely a radar sensor, such as many GM vehicles have in bumpers for blind spot monitoring. If one of those is next to the camera, I could see that as an issue. I'm neeting a friend Friday morning who has a V1Gen2 - I'll see how it reacts in my truck.

Interesting side note - while trying to take a photo of my V1Gen1 this morning, my phone's camera auto focus triggered false alerts, both laser and radar bands! Certainly didn't expect that.

 

Interesting side note - while trying to take a photo of my V1Gen1 this morning, my phone's camera auto focus triggered false alerts, both laser and radar bands! Certainly didn't expect that.

iPhone has built in LIDAR so it can definitely trigger the laser and radar bands. You can mess with people driving down single lane roads by pointing your camera out of your windshield, if they have a laser/radar detector it will usually set it off at close range lol.

 

Isn't radar illegal?

 

Not in Texas!

 

I thought of an experiment to try. What if those having problems lined the plastic camera cover with aluminum foil? It should reflect any stray radar signals away from the detector. I'm sure most of us have a roll of foil in the kitchen, and would be a cheap & easy experiment.

 

I already had this on my mind, I have had a damn sinus infection for two weeks and have not felt like taking it apart. As soon as I can I will try this out. I guess I can reuse my aluminum foil hat that protects me from OnStar LoL

 

My sympathy on the infection! Those are never fun. Just remember, good conspiracy theorists keep the foil shiny side up!

 

So to finish up this discussion, I never got around to the tinfoil around the camera trick but I did find out the answer. This answer comes from another very nice fellow on the Radar Detector forums. He was also nice enough to send me the disassembly instructions from the GM service manual. I am going to use his helpful tips on my truck this weekend. I am also going to post his findings below.
Hopefully this will help some of you guys.



My V1G2 alerts to my own 2023 Chevrolet Colorado displays @ 33.749 while mounted to the windshield with a single bar for strength and with 3 to 5 beeps about every 5 to 20 minutes out on the road. If I have the V1 mounted on the top of the windshield it registers as the front antenna and if on the bottom of the windshield it registers as the rear antenna. However, my R8 does not have this issue. Of course I could just use the R8 and be done with it, but I want the V1G2 to work as well.

I used the V1 as a sniffer to determine where the signal was coming from and found it was both the center display AND the instrument cluster display. The V1 would detect as much as 3 bars of signal strength depending on how close I got the detector to the back of the display. See pic below for 2 bar signal while pointed at the back of the center display.

I started my mitigation with the center display as it was worse than the instrument cluster display. The picture below is the back of the display removed from the vehicle with the plastic cover off, but HVAC controls still attached.

Since the display itself extended above the metal bracket I decided to use aluminum tape on the plastic area to extend the metal shield and block the signal from escaping. I added tape to the top of the display as can be seen by the below picture as well as around the connectors since these areas are where the V1 indicated the strongest signal was coming from.

This proved to be effective as I could no longer get 2 bars of signal strength when the V1 was positioned as in the first picture. I would still get an occasional 1 bar beep up close, but most of the time it was no beep.

For the Cluster Display I took a very similar approach except I added the tape to the inside of the back cover. Actually, I could have added it to the outside of the cover, but liked the concealed idea more. See pic below...
This proved to be effective as I could no longer get 2 bars of signal strength when the V1 was positioned as in the first picture. I would still get an occasional 1 bar beep up close, but most of the time it was no beep.

I also went back and tried adding even more tape to the center display just to see if I could get rid of even more noise, but it appeared to push the signal out through the screen toward me and I did not want that. I preferred it go down into the dash and not at me.

In summary it was a relatively easy mitigation and I have taken two 6 hour drives since the mod without a 33.749 alert. Of course this will void the display warranty, but that doesn't really concern me all that much as I have way too much money into counter measures to let this stop me.

Maybe this can help others with similar issues??

 

Great post, this is very helpful and I'm going to try this to eliminate my false alarms. Is there any particular foil tape you recommend? Looking on Amazon, I found a lot of silver foil tape made for duct taping, but I also found some copper tape like this that advertises EMI and RFI shielding. Would this be better?

 

These are the instructions for dash disassembly
Cluster Removal.pdf

 

This is really good info and a great write up. I am guessing this only affects some radar detectors as I have an Escort Max360c MkII mounted center dash at the base of the windshield (suction cup mount about 3 inches from the dash) and I am not getting any false alerts from my truck. I do know that the Escort Max360c MkII does have the ability to turn on or off certain band frequencies it is monitoring. I pretty much left all of the defaults of what bands it had on or off and the reported 33.749 GHz signal is in Ka Narrow 2 band and is on by default for the detector. Ka Narrow 1 (33.400 - 33.700) and Ka Narrow 3 (33.900 - 34.200) are off by default, but those bands are for lower and higher frequencies than the reported 33.749 GHz. I am curious if that is the actual offending frequency. I may try enabling the turned off bands one at a time and see if I begin to get false alerts. Maybe the displays in the trucks "leak" at different frequencies? Either way, applying the foil tape will definitely block it no matter which frequency is "leaking".

 

All of the thanks goes to the original poster on the Radar detector forums, but I'm glad someone figured something out. I have been running my V1 Gen1 in the Colorado and it does not pic up the false radar. I guess the V1 Gen2 is just more sensitive. I'll be glad to get the gen2 back in the truck. The Gen1 just pics up to much trash even with programming.

 

I have an Escort Max360c and it falses quite a bit on Ka displaying a single bar of signal strength. I did read this detector is prone to Ka falsing but perhaps I need to do a bit of additional research to see if it's tied to the vehicle. I does it also in a 2018 Camry.

 

I tried the same radar. I got constant false ka to the point where I thought it was the detector. I switched to my old trusty uniden r4 and its flawless.

 

I finally had time to try the instructions above to block off the interference from the instrument cluster and the radio display. I followed the information above and it fixed my problem completely.
I took some pictures incase anyone wants to see the dash apart. It was really very simple to disassemble.

 

Problem solved, looks ghetto but it actually works the aluminum foil blocks the RF frequency coming off the info screen. When I remove the aluminum detector goes stupid.

 

A close friend just bought a new Traverse and had the same issues with his V1 Gen2 getting false signals from within the vehicle. He contacted Nate at Valentine directly for assistance. It turns out the culprit frequencies fall between the standard ranges in the app for blocking. Valentine was able to walk him through blocking the 2 frequencies, no dash disassembly or foil required. It worked perfectly on a recent road trip.

 

I wondered about this, it seemed to me that my V1 doesn't have any issues that V2 should be able to block the offending frequencies since you can fine tune in app. Thanks for the confirmation here. I've been putting off upgrading to V2 because of this. Is it possible for you to get the frequencies he blocked? I know I can isolate them after getting the detector but if someone has already gone through this exercise that info would be valuable here.

 

Absolutely! He said they were 33.750 and 35.100. Hopefully this helps anyone with other detector brands as well, who may be experiencing similar falsing.

 

Has anyone done the foil on a Canyon? I'm in the process of trying this. I got the 3 bolts out, but the display doesn't want to come out easily, and I don't really want to pull too hard. The instructions above are for a Colorado, and I'm wondering if there are any differences, of if the display on the Colorado was also a hard pull to get out?

 

I thought I would post a few comments after I went through this. First, I found this video that helped with the removal of the display screen. Also, I have a Canyon, and there is one slight difference from the Colorado dash instructions that have been posted. There is a screw under the leather trim near the passenger side vent. With that, you need to pry the thin leather strip out first to get to that screw, so you can remove the long piece with the vent attached. Other than that, the instructions are identical. I used copper foil tape I bought on Amazon, and I first tried only doing the center display, but I still received KA warnings, so I ended up doing both the center display and the instrument display.

I really considered just programming out the frequencies being thrown, but I didn't want to risk a police radar being on the same one. Overall, not too bad of a process, even though it's a little nerve racking taking apart your brand new truck!

 

...
I really considered just programming out the frequencies being thrown, but I didn't want to risk a police radar being on the same one.
...

Given that my V1 first gen doesn't alert on these frequencies and it was the defacto standard for the last couple of decades before the V1 2nd gen came out, I tend to think you are fine programming out these frequencies. Glad the project worked out for you though.

 

Well, here I am searching for this topic because I bought a Uniden R4W and at first had no issues (2024 Bison). I had a rather large mount for a HAM radio phone on the lower right side of it coming up from a ball mount in the dash which was empty but sort of boxing the radar detector in (mounted on a blend mound from the mirror) and it had no false alarms. I didn't think anything of it when I changed that empty mount to a simple arm sticking out with just a small clip mount for a Kenwood D75 HT radio. Of course I didn't test anything because everything was working fine. Then I got on the road for a 1500 MILE ROAD TRIP and the R4W was constantly alarming on the Ka band and I couldn't figure it out. I eventually just turned down the sensitivity on the Ka band until it stopped, but now I see that this is a STUPID GM RF leak. WTF!?!? Grrrrr....

 

I'm going to do some experiments this week, I'm pretty sure I can just shield the detector because of discovering, accidentally, that my giant phone mount being between it and the dash was enough to shield it from GMs crappy RF engineering. I will report back here on how to bandaid this without tearing the dash apart...

 

Ok, finally got around to fixing this. Here's a picture of my Uniden R4W mounted on the mirror via a BlendMount showing the frequency that is leaking out of GMs poorly designed / shielded center media unit:

Here's a picture of the shield I used (a thin piece of aluminum shim and some velcro) which is just enough to block the RF coming from the dash:

I would have never discovered it would take so little to shield it except for having a temporary mount for a HAM radio just below the radar detector and above the touch screen. The radar detector never had any false alarms until the day I took out the HAM radio mount and it took me a while to realize what was going on.

If you want to do this and test things first, just take some aluminum foil and fold it over a few times into a 2" wide strip and hold it under your radar detector until you figure out where you need to block the RF coming from the dash.

Hope this helps someone down the road!

 

Well, dunno if that qualifies as "poorly designed/shielded". There are standards all electronics have to conform to with levels of emissivity. If it met those, then you can't blame GMC because you have a very sensitive radar unit or poorly shielded/poor filters one. My R8 doesn't false just due to the truck, or any other of the 3 vehicles I have or even any of the rental cars I've used it in. Maybe you just need to step up to a better detector with better signal processing and filters? Or, it would be easier to open up the radar detector and put aluminum tape inside that instead of having to rip your dash apart.

Best of luck!