A successful first trip with the QLCD

[Scott Fisher <sefisher@cisco.com>]

QLCD, if you recall, stands for Quattro List Cloaking Device, list
member Doyt Echelberger's patented invention for avoiding unwanted
police attention on the highway.

Last week, my wife and her sister took our three kids to southern
California to visit my wife's 97-year-old grandmother.  The trip, some
385 miles each way, is one we know far too well, having moved up to
Silly Valley when our oldest daughter (now 11) was about seven months
old.  

I was getting ready to follow on Friday and spend the weekend there, and
my wife commented, by way of advance intelligence, that she and her
sister had seen a large number of California Highway Patrol (CHP) cars
out on their trip south.

So I decided to install the QLCD.  This was a little trickier, as the
QLCD needs a road-speed input to generate cloaking waves of the
appropriate frequency.  And in addition to having the obligatory busted
odometer on my '83 Coupe GT, the speedometer itself expired on the way
home from work in a squealing clatter several months ago.  I did the
easy thing -- pull into a parking lot, pop the hood, disconnect the
cable where it comes out of the box on the firewall, and hope it isn't
squealing from the transmission end -- and have pretty much ignored it
since then.

But I needed some way to get that road-speed input for the QLCD. 
Fortunately, I remembered reading the October '81 Road and Track that my
friend Daren (previous owner of my Audi) recently gave me, which
included their full road test of the Audi GT: top speed in 5th gear was
111 mph @ 5400 RPM.  Quick mental arithmetic while driving determined
that an easy, if sloppy, algorithm for calculating road speed in 5th
should be to double the first two digits on the tach.  Hence 3250 = 65
mph (the speed limit along most of 101 these days) and 3500 = 70 (the
speed limit on the rest of it).  In fact, basically every tick mark on
my tach is 5 mph in 5th gear.  Couldn't be simpler (well, barring having
the speedo actually *WORK*...)

With this input coded into the QLCD, I set off on my trip Friday
afternoon.  There were in fact many CHP cruisers on the road; I passed
half a dozen who were heading north, and an additional three or four on
my southbound side, usually stopped at the side of the road writing up
some poor soul who didn't have access to cloaking technology.  (As an
interesting comparison, I saw precisely four other Audis on that leg of
the trip, out of what looked like thousands of other cars on the road
with me.)  What's more, the section south of King City is aggressively
patroled from the air, and I was very interested to see whether the QLCD
was equally effective against airborne patrols.

In short, the QLCD performed flawlessly; I was literally invisible to
police scrutiny, and this in a bright orange Audi coupe.  Furthermore, I
managed to make it from Sunnyvale, CA to Camarillo, about 360 miles
according to the highway signs, on one tank of gas -- 13.19 gallons,
just over 27 mpg, and in 5 hrs 15 minutes, for approximately 68 mph
average.  

So I wanted to thank Doyt for sharing his invention, and the Q-list for
passing on the specs for his Cloaking Device.  Especially since my last
trip home from southern California in August '98 (before installing the
QLCD) resulted in an $85 speeding ticket, it was very comforting to be
completely invisible to the CHP this time through.

(Oh, for those who either don't remember or who just joined: the Quattro
List Cloaking Device is Doyt Echelberger's "patented" technique for not
getting tickets -- drive the speed limit.  Who'da thought?  :-)

--Scott Fisher