[QUOTE=Leviosaurus]
No offense, but that thread seems to prove my point. The first encounter Mac mentions the cop would have nailed him had he been speeding. The V1 sounds like a great device for figuring out what a cop is doing once you have spotted the cop, but its the cop you haven’t spotted that’s the problem. All the false positives Mac mentions are another issue - until you’ve memorized where all the false positive sources are in your area, you won’t know the difference between a cop and a convenience store security system. If you know your area well enough to recognize the false positives, odds are you already know where the cops hang out anyway.
Those V1s are like advertisements, daring the cops to catch you. And they don’t do crap against lasers.
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Instant-On (the darling of Eliot PD) was designed to beat radar detectors, if you’re the only one on the road, NO detector will “save” you, the only way a detector works with IO radar is if you use a “rabbit”, a car far enough ahead of you to “draw the fire” of IO radar, you’re picking up the echoes/reflections off the rabbit, a typical IO alert is one or two alert beeps and then silence (the local PD’s in my area use Ka band almost exclusively), so if my V1 chirps once or twice on Ka band, I glance at the arrows to determine the source of the threat and then start my visual scans (after checking my speedo to make sure I’m at or under PSL)
the only problem with this is the V1 is so bloody sensitive that 1.5 to 2 mile IO detections are common, even around corners or below hills, this thing’s amazing
the detector has a slight advantage over the radar gun, in that it only has to detect the outgoing radar beam, the police radar unit has to wait for the beam’s echo to return to determine speed, the actual ticketable range of a radar gun is generally 3/4 mile or less, closer is better, as the driver of the targeted vehicle has less time to react, and the signal is stronger, and since the beam of a radar gun spreads in a cone, much like a flashlight beam, the closer the reading is to the targeted vehicle, there are less chances for the officer to misinterpret the vehicle being measured.
radar and radar operators can make mistakes, radar will return the speed of the most reflective object it encounters, if I’m traveling on a multilane highway in the rightmost lane in my little Saturn Ion, doing the PSL, and a large panel van, truck, or 18-wheeler is passing me, speeding, on the left, the radar gun could;
1; read my vehicle and return an accurate speed (not likely)
2; read the speed of the passing truck, instead of me (most likely)
3; add the speed of both our vehicles together and come up with a whopper of a speed (not likely, but possible, especially with an out-of-tune radar gun)
at this point, the radar gun has done it’s job and read the speed of vehicles passing through it’s cone of detection, the officer now has to determine who was speeding, and how much to ticket them for, does he go after the truck, or me?, bear in mind, I was doing the PSL and the truck was speeding (lets say 15-20 over), it’s possible the officer could misinterpret the speed read from the truck as my speed, BAM!, I get an undeserved ticket that I have to fight in court, as I was NOT speeding
oh, and no, I don’t deliberately speed, and I do find that a detector does make me more observant of my speedometer
A detector is simply a highly specialized radio reciever, nothing more, it should be how it’s used that determines if it’s illegal or not, the detector is a simple inanimate object, nothing more