There were also a few provinces in Canada trying out the radar-detector-detectors. Apparently almost all microwave devices use the same IF frequency in the first stage, which is hard to keep from leaking. A friend mentioned sitting in the cruiser with his son, an OPP officer. They were facing the road from about a hundred feet away, well hidden. When a vehicle with a detector passed in front of the car, the indicator would beep. Then they would turn onto the highway and give chase. The brought one into the small town where he lived and caught a dozen illegal detectors before word got around.
Apparently now, there are also radar detector detector detectors, that will warn you if the police have a detector detector.
Plus some detectors claim to be “undetectable” which I assume means either they don’t use IF frequency mixing, or they use a non-standard frequency. Most are short on published details.
Now you just install the Scanner Radio app on your Android phone and it works as a scanner monitoring all emergency frequencies in your area. Works just like the old scanners.
It doesn’t work as a scanner. It works as a media player, playing an audio stream. There is still an actual scanner somewhere at the other end, doing the work of a scanner. (And there are many areas where nobody has volunteered to stream anything.)
Very cool. Police are very suspicious of you if they find you on a scanner listening to their chatter. Now criminals can leave their scanner at home, register it with the app, and listen without any cops being the wiser,
Oh, and I’m sure there are legitimate uses for it too.
Police radios used to have channels, and you could tune to a channel and listen to a conversation. Quite a few police radio systems went to the channel-hopping system, where both ends would hop from channel to channel for a clear channel and to foil eavesdroppers. I would not be surprised if they also went to encryption recently.
Cheap radar detectors leak so much RF, they set off my detector. One of the biggest sources of false alarms on long road trips for me were other people with cheap detectors.
My V1 would start going nuts as I approached them, I’d look over at their windshield as I passed, and sure enough, there it would be.
Yes. It’s called a Bear Tracker. I have the Compact version. It works very well.
What it does is, it detects the mobile repeater that some squad cars have. This allows an officers hand held radio to have greater range by bouncing the signal on his squad car radio. The Bear Tracker detects the mobile repeater signal up to 3 miles away. There are very few false alarms.
However, most police squads don’t need mobile repeaters and the only agencies that tend to have them are state police/highway patrol forces where officers are very far away from their dispatch base.
Electrolert, the company that made the original Fuzzbuster radar detector (which, contrary to popular belief, was not the first radar detector ever made) made a product called "Spy Buster"which was a “AIRCRAFT PROXIMITY DETECTOR” . It detected police Cessnas that clocked cars from above by VASCAR (stopwatch) and were otherwise undetectable. I don’t know how well it worked. ImageShack - Best place for all of your image hosting and image sharing needs
I have a Valentine One (yeah, I know I’m a cop. But I like to know when I’m under police surveillance my self, which is what running radar basically is). Many of times I’ve gone through speed zones where officers were using LIDAR (laser) and the V1 didn’t make a peep. Having been trained in Laser and having used it I know why this is: 99% of the time the laser gun is aimed at the front license plate or bumper. There is a red dot scope on it just like a real gun. At 1000 feet the circumference of the laser beam is only that of a coffee can at most. Unlike radar it doesn’t spread or scatter. So a detector on the windshield or visor sees nothing to detect. This is why you’ll also get no warning as cars in front of you are being clocked. More and more agencies are switching to laser and getting rid of all their radar units completely.
VASCAR is not the same as a stopwatch and fixed distance markers used by aircraft. It is a particular time-distance speed measurement device linked to a police car’s speedometer and odometer. Unlike the simple stopwatch, with VASCAR speed can be calculated using arbitrary landmarks that need not be at any particular spacing or location.
VASCAR requires that the police officer trigger the device several times, depending on which mode is used :
Target car and police car traveling in opposite direction mode: (this is the main mode used)
Trigger 1 when target car passes a fixed landmark (tree, sign, bush, reflector post, etc.)
Trigger 2 when target car passes police car.
Trigger 3 when police car passes the Trigger 1 landmark.
Police car following target car mode: (seldom used, because it is easier just to pace the target car)
Trigger1 when target car passes first landmark.
Trigger2 when police car passes first landmark
Trigger3 when target car passes passes second landmark
Trigger4 when police car passes second landmark.
Using shadows, or the edges of the headlight beams, it is possible to judge fairly accurately the vehicle’s proximity to the landmarks. As long as the same criteria is used for both the target and police car, it doesn’t matter if the triggering is done when the vehicle is exactly abeam the landmark.
I think there is at least one, and possibly several other modes, but this is what I can recall from when I looked into this after being ticketed in the late 1980’s near Silverton, CO.
I had this idea a looong time ago. You make a device that looks just like a highway reflector, except it is a solar powered radar emitter. You put these all over the place, setting off detectors, and making them useless.
My plan went further though. You leave a glitch in the system allowing it to be defeated. After you made your fortune selling the devices to governments all over the country, you sell the plans on defeating the system to the radar detector manufacturers! Win - Win (at least for me).
As a ute with a plethora of sports cars in my driveway, I used to use radar detectors with varying success. I’ve gotten a bit more mellow as I have aged.
However, we make 1 to 3 trips from Atlanta to Florida per year, and I’m not one to poke along.
I don’t want to drive 130 the whole way. (Well, I do, but I won’t.) I just want to do a solid 75-80mph. Not so fast I can’t see what’s coming, but makes decent distance for 8-10 hours. The speed limit on I-75 or I-95 is generally 65 or 70 out in the country, so we’re not exactly Gumball Rally material.
I have a BELGX65 that works pretty well for me. Because there’s always some traffic on these roads, there’s always someone ahead to pop the radar for me. Especially useful at night when you can’t see anything up ahead. I just pick up the stray signals, drop 8mph, and roll by with a smile. Last trip to Orlando in January, it saved me from at least 8 different encounters driving at night both ways.
It may not be perfection, but I’ve been ticket-free for years.
Well in actuality it isn’t, but I dumbed it down so as not to get over technical about it. But to the layman it actually is a stopwatch. Try explaining VASCAR to someone in person and 10 seconds into it they say “oh, like a stop watch method”. I guarantee it.
I remember reading in a car magazine that it was done. I want to say it was in Georgia but cannot remember for sure. Someone took it to court and it was ruled illegal since it was purposely interfering interfering with a radio receiver.
This is all based on a faint memory and I have no cite on it at this time.
