One of my brothers - get him in a moving car and he’s out like a light in 15 minutes. His wife has to do all the driving in their family if they’re going out of town.
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I wish there was someone to get reliable, unassailable data about radar detector efficacy. I was under the impression that it was common knowledge that any and all radar detectors do not work.
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Every summer since I moved to the US, I have driven to Alberta. 2543 miles one-way; last summer we put 7037 miles on our vehicle between leaving Baltimore, going to Yellowknife NWT, and back to Baltimore. The first year it was just me and my ten-year-old son.
I found that stopping every few hours to pee or stretch, or just to make some lunch (we travelled with a cooler) helped. I went 12 hours one day, without being tired at the end of it. I stopped only because it was dark and there wasn’t another town to stay in for another three hours or so.
Car and Driver magazine does a test every three years. They use a huge proving ground and several engineers from different disciplines, and come up with tests that simulate normal and worst-case conditions. They buy their detectors anonymously at stores (or anonymously from Valentine) and the engineers take them apart after testing to screen for ringers.
The garden-variety el-cheapo Wal-Mart radar detector is useless at best - not sensitive to anything at a useful range, capable at going nuts every time you go past a shopping center, and so poorly designed that it’ll set off other radar detectors.
A Passport 8500 or, better yet, a Valentine One, is a great device. It will pick up REFLECTED radar beams and screen the waveforms for anything a police radar device could emit. It will pick up direct radar beams at a distance of several miles - much longer than the range of a policeman’s eyes. It will filter out minor sources of off-band radar (automatic doors and the like). The Valentine will even tell you WHERE the radar sources are and HOW MANY of them there are.