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Automotive News & Views Radar/Lidar detectors
1206 messages, Last post on Dec 28, 2008 at 5:16 PM
You are in the Automotive News & Views Forum. Your Hosts are steve_ & claires
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http://www.radar-guys.com/wh2270.htm. Separate laser antenna. Whistler probably has a site but don't know it. Don't know anything about this site or company but some info there. Re: VA police.... a friend of mine (out of state tag) had a detector confiscated about 13 years ago. About a year later I was driving through VA in mountains on interstate....stopped by a radar unit for doing 63 in a 55 while going downhill. Seemed somewhat anal to me! Cops walked around my car looking in the windows. I had taken my detector down at the state line (based on friends experience) and it was in the glove box. |
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I finally found the K40 site... Really meandering, with lots of flashy, needlessly animated graphics that take forever to load and a trail of links that doesn't make much sense if your goal is to educate people about your product. I fear that their goal is rather to dazzle people with footwork. That doesn't necessarily mean that their product isn't good. It might be. They do have a modular detector with a very stealthy display. I'm interested in some info now on how well it works. They have a lot of other products. One is a laser "diffuser", I think they call it. Hm. I'll keep an open mind, but I'm not convinced yet. Hard to find any rational (non-sales, non-hype) talk on that site. How would a diffuser work? Seems to me you'd have to have actual physical lenses, like a fog. Maybe it's a fog machine. One of the coolest products I've seen yet (not a K40 product) is for photo-radar. It's a simple photographic lamp; a slave unit that is triggered by a bright light aimed at it. It senses the flash from the photo-radar and goes off, aimed at the license plate. The plate is then over-exposed. When the cops get the photo back from the drugstore, the license plate is a big white blob. Pretty clever, I think. |
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Mind the language!?!... This is a family site. Keep it clean and keep it civil or I will be obliged to use my delete key. Front Porch Philosopher SUV, Pickup, & Aftermarket and Accessories Host |
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I am still considering the K40, but now that I have heard of other remote installs, I'll hold off. I used the K40 web site to have them send me installer information and I got a list of three in my area (N. VA). I talked to one of the guys who had one installed and his reaction was positive. I really like the one year we-pay-your-ticket guarantee, something I haven't seen before. Speedlabs (www.speedlabs.com) has a report floating about regarding laser jammers. They certainly liked K40's system. I did a search months ago on K40 installations. Some guy had one installed in his Z28 with the warning lights mounted into the rearview mirror. I'll look for the sight and post it hear after I get this proposal done. Speaking of which... |
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Ok, here's the deal with jammers. There are two types: Active and Passive. The jammers that the mags have been "testing" and I use that term loosely, are passive. This means that they absorb the radar, mix it with what the manufacturer's call white noise, and rebroadcast (sometimes amplified) it back to the radar gun. The idea is that the original signal will be overwhelmed by this now larger signal. Reality, as the mags have shown is that they just don't work. Legalities of this are debateable. Manufacturers are ready to fight it, and some were even saying that they would fight the suit for you for no fee if you got caught with one and charged with criminal misconduct. Anyway, the cops never would press charges because they didn't work and they pulled you over for doing 68 in a 55 anyway. Now. Actives. There are (in the black world) some real jammers. These suckers really do work. You see, radar works by emitting a signal at a known frequency and via the doppler effect, they receive the return signal at another frequency. The higher the return frequency, the faster you were just nailed. This signal once returned to the sending unit is at a much lower power level than it was when sent out. An active jammer will examine the received radar signal and calculate its frequency. You can actually adjust them to have the radar gun read whatever you want it to read. You can have it do say 80% of what you were really doing, or 55 at all times, whatever. The jammer then sends the appropriately higher or lower frequency to the radar gun, and voila the cop sees you were doing whatever you told him you were doing. This is done by the jammer sending out a higher powered signal than the gun would normally receive, thus over-riding the original signal, which is never seen by the gun. And one more thing. If you get caught with this thing. You are in DEEP Kimshee. You have just broken serious FCC laws. How do you get caught? Blow by the stationary cop at 110, and have his gun say 55. You in a heep o trouble. |
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| Guess we can't do blink. Who knew? | |
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| What's the going price on a K40? | |
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On a couple of points: to MongoaPawn re: Automobile Magazine report.... Instant on is the ONLY radar that poses a challenge to ANY modern detector. You are absolutely correct regarding anti-falsing being a very important feature of the detector. Speedlabs did *several runs* per detector against instant-on. I've NEVER ONCE, ever, while driving with a good, modern detector, failed to pick up a stationary always-on radar AT ANY TIME. They are NO CHALLENGE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, REGARDLESS OF TERRAIN. Instant-on is another story. I drove with cobra RD3120 in an X & K band state & sometimes, you hear the instant-on blip in front of you, sometimes, your first warning is the meter pegging. So, I would say, that given the *facts* of radar, 11000 feet versus 8000 feet of "range" is absolutely irrelevant as *any modern detector* can beat a stationary radar. However, good detectors can beat instant on, *some* of the time, and how often is dictated by a) luck (foremost) and b) detector sensitivity. Naturally, having one that has poor anti-falsing is bad. The V1 is an absolutely phenomenal detector, #2 according to Speedlabs, #1 or #2 according to everyone else's reviews. The BEL 855/955 is also very good, and bested V1 against Ka stationary and Ka instant-on (Speedlabs), which is the *most* challenging radar band. X band is so easy to detect as to not even be worth testing any more. K is getting the same way, as long as it ain't instant-on. Ka band is the more modern, has the narrowest beam of the 3, and has newer, low-power instant-on modes, to make it tougher to detect down the road. As far as jammers go, the passive ones are a toaster, junk, they do not work. The Phantom RCD will jam X band analog & a Falcon (I believe) K band gun, NO Ka band. As pointed out, it is FCC illegal, and is also illegal in some states. You can buy one at http://www.car-trek.com/jammers/. It is the only radar jammer that works. As far as laser jammers, some will jam both the LTI Marskman LIDAR and the other major LIDAR gun brand all the way to the gun, using both headlights & license plate as targets. The top rated one (by Speedlabs) was the K40 Laser Diffuser, but there are others with varying degrees of effectiveness. They also cost $$$ and mount to your license plate, so don't mess up parallel parking or else it's smashola. As far as VA goes, it's a $40 ticket w/ no points to have a detector. They cannot confiscate it. |
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The quote I got from the installer was $1200 for the complete whiz-bang K40 system. That was for: Front and back super wide band radar & laser antennas, "sonar radar" system (basically a gieger counter-like system where the clicks get louder as you get closer), and a laser jammer on the front plate, installed. Like I said, pricey. Oh, that was before the 10% discount from their web site. |
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