Folks: I'm looking for opinions/suggestions as to the best place to mount the remote display for my Valentine 1 on my 2008 E91. As you can see from the pic, I currently have it in the little tray on the center console, but I'm not wild about this for aesthetic and practical reasons. Aesthetic in that it looks a little temporary (I know I could eventually drill a hole in the bottom of the tray to run the cord out of...but still); but more important, practical as the display does little good if I have to lower my eyes from the road to see it. Unfortunately, I can't figure out a good place for it that doesn't mean looking down. I've seen the post where someone used a binder clip to secure it to the little ledge right below the tach or speedo...but IMO that blocks the bottom gauges. Plus, it requires snaking the cable up around the steering wheel column, which also seems sort of ugly. Same deal with the mod where it's mounted in the ashtray. It could also probably be affixed to the upper dash somehow, but that would make it visible from behind and the side (e.g. to anyone following or to my side), and that sort of undoes the purpose of the remote. Frankly, simply not using the display is possible in that it's easy to see the detector (and mute it, etc.) where I have that mounted (top of the windshield to the right of the mirror) is quite accessible; but I've gotten used to operating the thing entirely in stealth mode in my previous car (MINI S), and I'd like to be able to do that in this car. Any suggestions?
It would be nice if they offfered a smaller-footprint remote display in addition to the current iteration. The earlier design of these was not as wide, lacking the mute button. I doubt this helps you, but in my E30 I velcro mine to the underside of the dash cowl, with the wire to the wired-in adapter coming out above the instrument cluster, and running up the A-pillar to get to the adapter and a jack wired up for the detector. This puts it directly in the forward line of view where you don't have to lower your eyes any more than necessary to see the display, and would only be visible to someone on the side, within a fairly narrow range.. Downside is it blocks the turn signal & high beam indicator lights, but that hasn't been a big deal - I have the earlier remote display, so visually, it encroaches only slightly on the speedometer & tach views, and as far as the speedometer goes, in a high enough speed range that's not a bother either. I plan to do a similar placement in the E34, but the display unit will have to mount inside the instrument cluster, since the cluster is shaped to come to the front edge of the dash cowl, leaving no room to fit the display. If you use the wired-in adapter, consider it's accessibility. Over time, the tabs on the phone-jack type connectors will weaken and break - an issue that can come up if you're regularly connecting/disconnecting the detector (mine goes out of view anytime I'm not in the car). I made up an extension with a female connector to not have to dig through access to the remote wiring adapter. I think I recall seeing offered on ebay something that would translate the V1 alerts to the si-board display for certain models, but I think that was for older 5's & 7's.
Thanks for your helpful and descriptive post! I guess the positive way of looking at this is that BMW has designed the car so that there's very little wasted space on the dash and in the driver's field of view. Therefore, finding a place to stick this little box - that doesn't block other existing things - is difficult. Over on other sites' forums (where I'm also looking for answers), I have found pages and pages of posts where people have gone to great modding lengths to mount the remote in what are basically locations where you need to look down toward the gear shift/your knees/your lap to see the alerting arrows and bogey count....which seems pretty counter-productive to me.
