Police radar being removed from cars...

[scumdog]

Quite true. Get a detector with a decent detection range and "instant on" will alert you enough to the presence of a tax collector.

ONLY if there's not much traffic about and the cop is only checking the odd car that looks like it's going a bit quick.

If the first time he uses it in a few minutes is right on front of and you're the target the best you can hope for is to scrub a few km off your speed before he gets a lock on you, an given it takes less than a second to go from 'on' to 'lock' you'll have to be quick.

Likewise when checking a speed - 'blip-blip', it's on and off that fast

[The Pastor]

hey brainwave.

we need an NZer to produce way better radars for the police, and then put in a gps tracking unit in every one, then sell a subscription based licnce for new radar dectors (which are basicly just gps's) so we know excatly where all the cops are.

man you'd make a killing, selling to the cops, and to the crims!

[Swoop]

If the first time he uses it in a few minutes is right on front of and you're the target the best you can hope for is to scrub a few km off your speed before he gets a lock on you, an given it takes less than a second to go from 'on' to 'lock' you'll have to be quick.

Likewise when checking a speed - 'blip-blip', it's on and off that fast

It doesn't matter how much traffic is about, only the fact that the unit has sent the signal. A good quality detector can pic that signal up from quite some range away (km's!).
Quite true, if a patrol car is close and "energises", we know the outcome for the target...

I have picked up radar signal when the cop car was over the crest of a hill and also another occasion when we were approaching at 90 degrees from each other, meaning that the radar wouldn't have picked up a target.

Moral of the story: Invest in decent quality detector units.

[ynot slow]

he gets a lock on you, an given it takes less than a second to go from 'on' to 'lock' you'll have to be quick.

Holy shit sounds like you guys are getting intercontinental ballistic missiles to get speeding message through,mind you bet sometimes ya wish you could blast some f.ckwits.

Dedicated units like old days would be good,assuming the police have time for crime,and not poached for highway duties.Biggest rort that John Banks got into parliament by increasing officers,all he did was remove transport division and merged the lot and voila more police,albeit the force has increased over the years.

[scumdog]

Holy shit sounds like you guys are getting intercontinental ballistic missiles to get speeding message through,mind you bet sometimes ya wish you could blast some f.ckwits.

Dedicated units like old days would be good,assuming the police have time for crime,and not poached for highway duties.Biggest rort that John Banks got into parliament by increasing officers,all he did was remove transport division and merged the lot and voila more police,albeit the force has increased over the years.

Yup, a salient point that has gone over a lot of craniums like a bomber squadron.

Put the traffic guys in black'n'white cars and nobody would complain about cops, tickets and speeding anymore, after all, they never moaned about those things back in the 'ol days before the merger, did they?

[jono035]

Actually, that local oscillator signal is quite massive. All they did was move the detectors LO elsewhere so the detector-detector couldn't find it. "cat and mouse" is all that is, and is certainly not any level of smartness.

Seriously, pointing a massive beam of microwave energy down the road and pulling tones out of its' mixer diode is the most ridiculously simple radar there is. If such a device was made in the 1950's it would have only one valve in it.

Steve

Entirely agree with you about the level of complexity involved in doppler radar, however I'm pretty sure that no amount of processing power is going to make it significantly harder to detect the radar units. It also wouldn't surprise me if there is more money making detectors than the radar units themselves...

Not quite. That was an early approach to dealing with the detector detector problem. But the snakes soon caught on to that , and extended their search frequencies.

But the latest Bel Sti (and others) do shield the signal completely.

Yep, you look at the current units and they're pretty nifty pieces of RF engineering. My boss had a Passport 8500 that broke outside warranty so we cracked it open. It's pretty damn well shielded really, basically the entire analogue stage is in a copper-foil-gasketed cast aluminium box within the plastic enclosure. In a few weeks I can probably stick one inside an EMI testing room and look at it with a spectrum analyser and see for myself perhaps....

ONLY if there's not much traffic about and the cop is only checking the odd car that looks like it's going a bit quick.

If the first time he uses it in a few minutes is right on front of and you're the target the best you can hope for is to scrub a few km off your speed before he gets a lock on you, an given it takes less than a second to go from 'on' to 'lock' you'll have to be quick.

Likewise when checking a speed - 'blip-blip', it's on and off that fast

Yep, and you're doing well to get more than a km or 2 out of the detectors so it really would only have to be a couple of minutes between cars.

I remember my boss (and my father at a separate time) telling me a story about the old radar guns the police had. If you had a an FM antenna and decently powerful transmitter you could cruise past the cop with the transmitter blatting out white noise and destroy the analogue front end of the gun, requiring it to be sent back to the manufacturer to have components replaced

[caseye]

There are only 1400 of those stalker units in the country.All are leased, the 400 being returned are old technology hence they are the ones going back.
That still leaves 1000 units in patrol cars.
Yes the odds of catching a speeding ticket by rader are reducing but who is willing to take a punt on that car having/not having a unit in it?
Not me, too old and silly to try flying past at warp nine hoping.

[jono035]

There are only 1400 of those stalker units in the country.All are leased, the 400 being returned are old technology hence they are the ones going back.
That still leaves 1000 units in patrol cars.
Yes the odds of catching a speeding ticket by rader are reducing but who is willing to take a punt on that car having/not having a unit in it?
Not me, too old and silly to try flying past at warp nine hoping.

And thats assuming they make maximum use of all 1400 at the moment. If they decide to return 400 units but put the other 1000 units to work for twice as many hours then that's still a net outcome of more speed-detecting being done...