I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had the experience of you know cruising down
the freeway with the Windows open not really paying attention to how fast
they're going and Bam flashing lights in
the rear view mirror and 5 minutes later you're holding your very own free ticket
to traffic court and a larger insurance
bill if only you'd been using a radar
detector a venerable piece of technology that speed demons everywhere have been
using for years to avoid such unpleasant surprises but first a little bit about
how radar Works police commonly use what's called Doppler radar to track how
fast passing cars are going and although Doppler radar is usually associated with
weather reporting the way it works makes it a pretty versatile tool a standard
police radar works by firing a radio signal at nearby traffic which hits
whichever car is being tracked and returns to the radar gun for analysis
the fact that the car is moving means that the return signal will have a
different frequency from the original this is called the doler effect and is
the same reason that an ambulance siren sounds lower in Pitch when it's speeding
away from you this difference in frequency is converted to a speed
readout that the officer can see to determine if you are exceeding the speed
limit Doppler radar Simplicity has made
it the tool of choice for traffic cops the world over for many years so
consumer grade radar detectors work then by detecting frequencies in the Doppler
bands since the radar signals are really just radio waves radar detectors operate
a lot like the radio in your car that you use to listen to music they're just
tuned to Doppler frequencies which are much higher than am and FM frequencies
So then whenever your radar detector picks up a Doppler signal it will alert
you in some way so that you can slow down before you get slapped with a
ticket of course though radar detectors aren't perfect and things like adaptive
radar cruise control on newer cars and even those automatic doors that you see
at the supermarket use frequencies in the Doppler range meaning that false
alarms are often a fact of life for people that use radar detectors but
aside from false alarms hampering Effectiveness police know how popular
radar detectors are so many police departments are now using liar which
uses a more focused beam of infrared light as opposed to Doppler radar which
tends to scatter making it easier to pick up liar detectors exist as well but
since police Point liar guns at one
smaller spot on a car often the license plate the detectors tend to be a lot
less effective but hold on a second I mean what if instead of just detecting a
police radar you could actually keep it from tracking your car well some more
sophisticated radar detectors have a jamming feature that emits extra signal
sign to confuse police radar and liar
but not surprisingly these are illegal
in many places since the cops don't exactly appreciate it when you actively
interfere with their equipment regular detectors however are allowed in quite a
few places including all but one US state a few provinces in western Canada
New Zealand and some countries in Europe just make sure you know what the laws
are in your area before you buy so you don't get smacked down with a camera of
irony because the device that you bought to avoid a traffic ticket just earned
you a traffic ticket or of course I mean
we could all just slow down and uh you know Kum bya and all that stuff however
if my experience rolling around out there and rush hour is any indication I
think we'd have a better chance of seeing Ford try and sell the Flintstone
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