Possible False POP alert

[mrmysterious]

I know a lot of you drive with POP disabled on your RD. I've been driving with it on just out of curiosity.

Friday, I was driving on my daily commute in an area where there is a KA threat. It's a two lane road with residential houses in the area. I've never had a POP alert before this time.

So, I'm driving along in traffic below the PSL and all of a sudden the detector goes CRAZY, I thought for sure it was KA hit, but then it says POP ALERT. I look for the patrol car and nothing.

So what can false a POP?

[kpatz]

Cobras, RadioShack and other similar cheap crappy RDs are the #1 cause of POP falses.

A weak normal Ka can sometimes be misinterpreted as POP too.

[RoadWarrior/RW]

I know a lot of you drive with POP disabled on your RD. I've been driving with it on just out of curiosity.

Friday, I was driving on my daily commute in an area where there is a KA threat. It's a two lane road with residential houses in the area. I've never had a POP alert before this time.

So, I'm driving along in traffic below the PSL and all of a sudden the detector goes CRAZY, I thought for sure it was KA hit, but then it says POP ALERT. I look for the patrol car and nothing.

So what can false a POP?

Which Ka police guns in that particular area? ... you see how important is to run your RD in tech mode!

Ka 33.8 MPH police radar guns are the only ones with the POP feature so, if police in your area does not use such Ka MPH units the answer is crystal clear: a FALSE alert and turn the POP off once it for all.

Chris

[TSi+WRX]

For me, this question is two-fold.

First, is there POP-enabled hardware in your area.

And second, more importantly, is POP actually being actively USED.

Just because the hardware is available doesn't mean that it's used. There's proof of this even locally where I live - a near-by township owns the equipment and their officers are trained for it, but, thanks to the ride-along that a fellow Forum member took, it was noted that they confessed to simply never bothering to use that function.

Unfortunately, the only way to really know whether the second concern is valid would be to verify, through a primary source, whether or not POP is in-use. This can understandably be difficult, so let's go with the following example:

Let's start with POP being enabled on your detector, for a first pass.

POP alert goes off on the detector, followed by a Ka alert (scenario where the officer is awarding citations). It could be that the officer is using POP, and is going to issue a citation and thus "went Ka" after the initial POP reading - but it could just as easily be a false from I/O Ka or a leaky Cobra, even if POP was not in-use.

So, we cruise back, with POP disabled on the detector. No POP warning seen, Ka alert lights up from the I/O use. But in this case, there's no way to positively confirm that the enforcer was not using POP. The absence of the POP warning really doesn't mean anything at all, as certainly, it could be that POP was not in-use, but it could also just mean that the enforcer, for whatever reason, chose not to use POP for that particular measurement.

I still see the only way to confirm POP use is by visual sighting of the hardware, *plus* confirmation from the LEO that POP was used.

Or, alternatively, privileged knowledge from within the department that it is being used.

Similarly, a tandem-vehicle, dual detector scenario (i.e. one car with POP-off, other with POP-on), while it would be able rule-out false positives, it cannot conclusively rule-out a false negative (i.e. neither detector reporting POP, but POP actually being used) - the only way to truly ascertain whether POP is in use is to visually identify the equipment, then have a confession from its operator whether POP was used at the moment it was detected.

For what it's worth, even "The Professor," jimbonzzz, agreed on this analysis.