GPS based warning system

To pay nearly £300 for a device to sit silently on top of your dashboard might seem a little extravagent. However in the case of the Cyclops, I might consider it worthwhile. For the 1% of the time when it does spark into life you'll be grateful.

When testing its competitor, the Road Angel I became so irritated by its constant bleeping that I had no interest in using it. The opposite proved to be true with the Cyclops.

The unit works straight out of the box and once secured on my dashboard, I drove off waiting for it to spark into an aural assault. No such irritation was forthcoming though. After locating the satellites the unit was silent until the very end of my day, when after many hours of tedious motorway plodding I headed towards a speed camera.

The unit started to bleep and displayed "3o^T" signifying a temporary camera may be present in this 30mph limit. Rapidly increasing bleeps followed by a flashing green and then flashing red display left me in no doubt as to what I was heading towards. Passing other cameras confirmed that the Cyclops will take account of the direction you're travelling in before alerting you to the presence of cameras.

On the motorways, the unit remains silent with the exception of the M25 where it warns of the gantries in the variable limit zone. At this point it did irritate however, warning of every gantry regardless of whether it was capable of housing cameras or not.

The only other irritation that I encountered during in-car use was that the unit could take some time to locate satellites. Whether that's a failing of the unit or a function of where I live I don't know. On one journey it took about twenty minutes to become active - not ideal.

The unit itself is a very good design. It's neat with good ergonimics and most importantly a very clear display. The display is bright, large and informative. You can set it to warn you when you're exceeding the speed limit, but for the majority of the time you'll be happy to leave it in the default setting where it warns you of camera locations.

You can update the database used by the unit by connecting to the Cyclops website. That downloads the latest information which is then pumped into the unit via a serial cable. How that would work if your serial port was taken up with a modem I'm not sure. The update took about 5 minutes when connected by ADSL.

Overall I liked the Cyclops and would certainly recommend it over the Road Angel with its relatively poor display and annoying beeps.