Under the Radar: Who builds the best high-end detector?
From the January 2014 Issue of Car and Driver
We live in a world increasingly polluted by radar. Automatic doors, traffic-measuring devices, adaptive cruise control, and blind-spot-monitoring systems can all emit the same frequencies used by law-enforcement agencies. To avoid the roadside tax collector while traveling at a brisk pace, radar-detector users need to distinguish the real threats from the noise.
We want to help you keep your record clean, so we tested two top-of-the-line models in ticket defense—the venerable Valentine One, our previous champ, and Escort’s new Passport Max. With the help of the speed-trap-subversion experts at Laser Interceptor, a laser-jammer manufacturer, we measured each detector’s range with five radar sources in four different scenarios. We also tested sensitivity to POP radar and LIDAR [see sidebar]. Finally, to examine how these units deal with false alerts, we drove a 22-mile suburban loop and recorded the number of warnings each detector issued. Here’s what we found:
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