Electronic Warfare on the road

Best Radar Detectors | Digital Trends

After the invention of the radar detector, police sometimes used a
radar-detector detector. In response, people developed
radar-detector-detector-detectors. It’s gotten complicated. These days,
police sometimes use something called Spectre III, and other versions,
to detect radar detectors. Say it 10 times fast …
detector-detector-detector-detector.

All of these detectors come with several modes. Most of them refer to
them as: Autoscan, City, and Highway modes. This mostly comes down to
the way the detector picks up X-Band, K-Band, and Ka-Band signals.
X-Band is the original kind, at 10.5 – 10.55 GHz. K-Band is the most
often used frequency, at 24.05 – 24.25 GHz. Ka-Band is the frequency
used for photo radar, as mentioned above, and some radar guns meant to
go undetected.

The Ka-Band frequency is about 34.2 to 35.2 GHz. The point of
adjusting the sensitivity to each of these “Bands” is that when you’re
on the highway you are traveling faster and surrounded by less
distracting elements for the radar, so you can amp the sensitivity up.
Driving through a dense city area on Highway mode might send out some
false alarms to you.

Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/best-radar-detectors/#ixzz3DEmlGJgj

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Best radar detector reviews from the world's most respected authority.

One of the best-kept secrets of the radar detector industry has been the substandard performance of many new detectors--regardless of brand or price--in countering the latest police radar. The new radar guns share
three characteristics which, together, have been causing endless headaches for detector designers--not to mention lead-footed drivers.
These new "smart" radar guns use DSP, digital signal processing, making them lightning-fast. In a recent test of front-line police radars, in stationary mode (parked at roadside) we found it possible to put them on RF Hold, not transmitting but ready to fire and, when a target approached, with a button-press we could get a speed in less than four-tenths of a second. Clairvoyance isn't required to guess the outcome of an encounter like this.

These radars are very low-powered compared to their forebears and most use Ka band, a lethal combination. The weak signal is tougher to detect and Ka band makes the job even harder because of its extraordinarily wide bandwidth, 2.6 Gigahertz (GHz), some 52 times wider than X band. Since radar can be anywhere within the spectrum, detectors must search the entire band looking for signals, a time-consuming process that  dramatically lowers sensitivity--and detection range--if conventional signal processing techniques are used.

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