Grab & Go with the 4910LR Magnetic Mount: The Best Magnetic Car Mount to keep your focus forward
Middle of a traffic stop. One last e-citation-based traffic ticket and you can go home. Where’s the freakin’ scanner? Without looking, you instinctively grab its tangled cord and yank. The scanner jumps from the passenger side floorboard but gets caught up in the center console. Choice words follow.
At the start of your shift you unwrapped its cord from around the spotlight handle where you found it hanging. You went to place it in the microphone-style clip but found that missing, torn from the dashboard. You place the scanner within easy reach on top of your gear bag. A few sharp turns later, it falls to the floorboard unnoticed because your attention is on the job at hand.
The whole exercise could be avoided with the best magnetic car mount made – L-Tron’s 4910LR Magnetic Mount – so strong and convenient – as Product Specialist Jason Culliton puts it, “You’ve just got to get it close.”
The 4910LR Magnetic Mount was designed for cops, from the voices of patrol officers looking for a simple mount everyone would use. Built with a strong magnet – rated for 70-pounds – designed to work with a recessed metal plate on the back of the scanner, users can literally throw it at the mount and it will stick.
“We don’t recommend people do that,” Culliton laughs, “but when you want to keep your awareness while occupied with a motorist, getting it close will secure it without thinking.”
The concept of a magnetic mount for a barcode scanner grew out of a project L-Tron engineers worked on with a client in Michigan who was looking for a better option, recalls L-Tron CEO RAD DeRose. “We felt we could design a better ‘mousetrap’,” he quipped. “We designed the mag mount, went back, got customer input, tweaked it, and built our solution.”
Police officers report attempts to hang the scanner on the microphone-style clip sometimes fail. Retired police officers on the L-Tron Law Enforcement Support Team think the scanner design is just different enough from the more-frequently-used radio mic, that muscle memory doesn’t work.
Culliton explains that the best magnetic car mount offers much more than just a place to hang a scanner. He says as simple and rugged L-Tron’s mag mount is, it actually enhances officer safety on two fronts. The first is not having to look for an errant scanner saves time spent on the side of the highway where police officers are most exposed.
The second is even more immediate.
“Talking with police officers all over the country, reducing distractions while on patrol is a huge issue. Being able to reach for the 4910LR and put it back, both without looking, keeps an officer’s eyes on the motorist in front of them,” he said. “Add to that how securely the mag mount keeps the scanner, its one less thing a police officer needs to worry about kicking around loose inside the patrol car, particularly if they’re involved in a pursuit or a crash.”
And that grab the cord and yank technique to retrieve the 4910LR? Culliton says he doesn’t recommend that either – another reason to invest in a mag mount. “We get quite a few bad cable calls,” he said. “When we look at the scanner and cable, we can tell – it’s almost always from pulling on the cord.”
Click here to watch the best magnetic car mount in action.
