The Roadpilot Micro Go is very small and we'll continue to bang on about this as its a major advantage making it easy to place the little speed trap system in your car. Power is supplied by a 12 volt cigarette lighter adaptor which enters the Go unit on a mini USB connector. The screen mount is simple in construction and allows the Go unit to slide in easy and clip home, we did struggle however with the ability to connect the power lead once the Roadpilot is in the holder. It has to be done this way as the Go slides through and into the holder meaning the cable must be attached from the rear which is very fiddly given the size of the socket.

With power now established and the little screen sucker system applied our Micro Go unit was securely clamped to the windscreen and ready for some real testing. Set-up is fairly simple given that there aren't hundreds of options, this is good as the interface for changing settings on the Roadpilot unit is a single silver button under the small 42mm screen. It involves multiple pushes and holds of the same button to work through the basic menu system, this sounds much worse than it really is and you soon become quite quick at flicking through the settings.

These include changing the warning style and distance, the distance is a key setting as the standard is set to 1 mile before the camera, which frankly is well a mile away! We were being warned of cameras that were in another London borough so we soon dialled in the range to about 300 yards. There are all sorts of other options a mixture of comfort type settings and display option including the chameleon like option to change the backlight colour of the Go to match your cars colour scheme, nice.

Keeping the unit up to date with the latest cameras is an essential part of any speed camera detector, Roadpilot pride themselves on the accuracy of their database and the Micro Go uses its USB connection to hook up via a host PC and the supplied software. Our review unit was fully up to date and ready for some road tests, with it glowing blue and showing it had enough satellites to work out where we were it was off into the mean streets of Reading. The Micro Go is a GPS based system so it won't pick up Radar from police speed guns, not that they use them much these days anyway. Instead it uses satellites to pinpoint our position and compares it in real time with a map of the UK's speed cameras. Much to the governments credit it was less than a mile from Wokefield park when we hit our first camera alert.

The unit leaps to life with a bleep and a warning of both the type of cameras in this case Gatso and the speed limit for that road, here it was 30mph. Given it was a typically sunny warm summers day (yeah right) we had the top down in LP's motor and did struggle to hear the small speaker on the Micro Go. In fact even roof up with the radio on the Micro isn't the loudest and the beeping can be missed, this has to be one of the downsides of such a small unit as the speaker is tiny and barely up to the job.

Visual alerts are clear despite the small LCD screen, the graphics are simple and communicative showing the speed you need to be at, plus the type of camera. The whole warning system is intelligent to know which way the camera is facing and what direction you are travelling in so you don't get warned about cameras on the other side of the road.

We went on to cruise around the lovely town of Reading then onto he M4 with its mobile traps to see how the Micro Go would fare and we are pleased to report a 100% accuracy on fixed traps and also knowing about all the various mobile traps in local roadwork's. Each time the unit also gave us the revised speed for the roadwork's and the camera warning, it seems that database is very up to date, at least in this part of the country. For Londoners like us there is also a nifty little congestion charge warning that lest you know when you get close to Red Kens cash machine zone.

Our week with the Micro Roadpilot Go in the car proved to be a safe and reliable one, the unit clearly does its base function very well and its size means its not intrusive in doing so. It is remarkably easy to place the Go in a corner of the windscreen where not only is it out of your way but is also reasonably difficult to spot for those who have taken to breaking into cars when they see an empty cradle. This is just as well as we gave up fiddling with the cradle and cable combo and left the unit in car even overnight, for us this is the biggest negative and one that needs to be resolved before we could give the Micro Go a 100% rating.

The other negatives are all a product of the units size, which is also its biggest plus point, so we can hardly moan too much about quiet audio alerts but then marvel at the diminutive device. A mixed bag maybe but a solid performer when it comes to keep your license clean.

Priced at £150 the Roadpilot Micro Go is a direct competitor for the Road Angel compact, its ships with 6 months of database updates as standard and a further year costs £50. From what we can understand the unit will actually cease to function if you do not update after 6 months rather than just functioning with an old map, while this isn't great old camera maps aren't really a good idea anyway.

Do we recommend the Micro Go? In a word yes, it raises the bar by further sliming down bulky speed camera warning systems while retaining accuracy and reliability. there are compromises of audio level and a small screen but overall it's a sound investment for today's drivers.

Published - 07/05/2006

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