Radar in ....

[Stilldrivin]

Work in progress...
We have all experienced the drop of the heart as we see red and blue lights in the rear view mirror. Your instant reaction is, how fast was I going or what did I do wrong! What if we could end that, for good? What if we, as drivers, could have the foreknowledge of what is called a ‘speed trap’? Modern technology has given us the opportunity allowing drivers to protect ourselves and avoid these nasty tickets. Radar detectors. A radar detector is a device used in a vehicle that recognizes different types of radar or laser bands. These bands are used by police officers to measure the speed being traveled by one or many vehicles at once. This product allows drivers to know where a police officer is using active radar giving the driver the option to slow down the vehicle, avoiding the ticket they would have received without this device. Radar detectors are becoming more common with drivers because of the amount of time spent on the road by the average driver. Most drivers are looking to cut back this time by speeding, but don’t want to pay the cost of a ticket so arm themselves with this device as a defense against the police force.



Also! How does owning a radar detector, for you as drivers of the commonwealth, help you drive more responsible or 'drive smarter'?

[Zapple]

Work in progress...
We have all experienced the drop of the heart as we see red and blue lights in the rear view mirror.

I do not think this is a good way to start. Not all of us have experienced that.

[zr1]

Radar Roy's report is a pretty thorough introduction, just put in an email and click the button.

Radar Detectors Buyer Guide and Comparison; Radar Roy

Our Wiki page is in its early stages:

Main Page - RadarDetector.net Wiki

A radar detector doesn't protect us from anything. It's just a sensor. Perhaps like the sensors on the fictional Star Trek Enterprise or the sensors on a nuclear submarine (which are acoustic). Radar detectors are a sensor to specific bands of the electromagnetic field that is used by police radar. There is a little interference as the automated door of the local 7-Eleven might be using the same frequency or the fancy parking sensor on a new Infinit car might also do that. Even other radar detectors, such as the cheap Cobra brands, will leak their own signal and set off radar detectors around them.

The main goal is for a radar detector to give a signal when police radar is noticed. What the driver does with that information is up to them. Current high-end detectors do that quite well and false alerts are filtered out much better than ever before.

Law enforcement has their own tactics to try to hide from radar detectors. One would be the use of "instant-on" radar. In this case, the officer leaves his radar gun off until the last moment when the car is very close, then he turns it on suddenly and gets his reading within a fraction of a second. That works well with one cop and one car in the middle of the Utah Salt Flats. The thing is, radar bounces off of everything....everything! So if the officer gets a radar reading on a car 1/2 mile ahead of me, my detector will sense that and give me a warning. If the cop waited 2-3 minutes between radar readings say several miles up Provo Canyon, that would be much more of a serious threat to a radar detector user.

But what's the motive of of the officer (or rather the officer's department policy) in the above example? Safety? Or to collect money for the government? If it truly was safety, they could leave their radar on all the time ("constant on") and the 5% of people with radar detectors would slow down to the speed limit and clog traffic to slow it down too. But using "instant on" is pretty much just to catch people, not to slow down traffic.