Hello from Indiana,
I guess I could say the same old “long time reader, first time poster” line to start.
I’ve been reading the forum for quite a while just to see what kind of opinions and advice are out there as far as anything to do with speed enforcement and how to avoid it! I, like most people don’t tend to purposely speed or evade the law. I just have a bad habit of being a lead foot and it’s gotten me in trouble in the past in a few, as I saw them, unfair ways. But that of course is coming from the guy that had to pay the fines and take DD class and Smokey has another view of it I’m sure.
I find the posts here very interesting because as with any message board there is a lot of in my opinion, a lot of misinformation or just plain ol’ B.S. out there! I think it comes from people going off of assumptions, a lack of knowledge of the subject matter yet “I’ll give my two cents anyway” mentality or a fear that the tools LEOs use are far more sophisticated than they actually are. A problem compounded by the fact that you not only have his word against yours, but he, the prosecution and the judge are all pay-rolled by the same people, YOU! And the bold, brash and sometimes flat out mistruths presented by the manufacturers of speed measuring devices just to make a buck.
That brings me to a little about my back ground. I work in microwave RF electronics. A job that I will not go into a ton of detail about, but let’s just say that I work on stuff that costs more than most police departments operate on in years. I touch test equipment that the guys at speed measuring device manufacturers could only dream of having access to. And I know for a fact that the radar and lidar devices LEO’s use are nowhere near as complex as the stuff I work on and you would be surprised at the numbers of things that can go wrong that give major errors that the little devices cannot account for let alone multimillion dollar equipment. They just have it easy as the judges are not engineers and simply don’t understand the technology nor do they care as long as they are getting paid and looking like they are being “tough on crime”. I know because I worked in LE while I was in school, not as a LEO mind you, but a more behind the scenes type of gig and have a few friends left that are LEOs and even they use radar detectors outside their home districts. They are a huge source of information even if it’s just observing them, let alone when they talk openly about the job.
I certainly feel that it is an “us against them” type of battle when it comes to the wild claims of LE technology manufacturers and shoot from the hip prosecutors and feel it is my duty to help out if I can.
Oh, and I am not one to “tip my hand” on what I use in my vehicles. That could be statistically useful information that hurts us all in the end. Just my opinion. I’ll just contribute on more of the technical side of things.
-AN/VLQ7(V)
