Where It’s Legal To Use

With the exception of Virginia, Washington D.C., and on military bases, use of a police radar detector is legal and in those states, police use a unit called a Spectre to detect the detectors. Use of a police radar detector is also illegal in commercial vehicles weighing over 10,000 pounds.

Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan are the only three provinces in Canada that allow their use and many countries such as Portugal, Finland and Spain ban their use entirely. If you drive in a state where a police radar detector is illegal, there is only one detector that can get by the Spectre, and that is the Beltronics STi Driver.

There are three bands of radar still in use today — The original X-Band, the K-Band, and the Ka-Band, along with laser radar; this gives police a fairly good arsenal of radar guns with which to shoot speeders. How well a police radar detector works is subjective when you consider about 15 million radar speeding tickets are issued yearly — that amounts to over 1,700 tickets per hour. It’s anyone’s guess how many tickets, justified or not, are avoided by the use of radar detectors.

Newer Radar Results Means Better Detectors

As long as there are people with the need for speed, there will be a market for the police radar detector and as the police radar becomes more sophisticated, so will the detectors. This means that when commercial suppliers provide new and better radars, other companies will come up with new and better police radar detector.

Of the newer members of the police radar detector family, laser detectors and POP radar detectors have been victimized by police radar. Only about 15% of radar detectors can defeat a radar gun operating in POP mode, which is when the radar is shot in a very quick burst of less than 80 milliseconds. Laser radar is about equally as tough for a police radar detector to defeat, but there are jammers on the market that can work against laser radar unless your vehicle is within 700 feet of the radar gun.

But any that promise a “pay your ticket” guarantee are just adding to the promotion of their product — most of these guarantees ring hollow according to the fine print. They generally don’t pay on the promise if the ticket is issued for a school zone violation, issued in a residential area, or for speeding more than 10 miles per hour over the speed limit.