Will radar detectors save you from a laser ticket? Perhaps, but it is a rare occurrence. This is why the laser detection feature on most radar detectors is often called “the ticket notifier.” If it goes off, the police officer probably already has your speed.Ĭan good radar detectors technically detect laser? Yes. It is not uncommon for even the best radar detectors to not pick up a LIDAR gun beam until you are within visual distance of the police officer – and by then, it’s probably too late. Problematically for radar detectors, the narrow beam of laser guns also mean that they cannot be reliably detected at distance. It typically takes about half a second for the speed to be obtained. They simply look through the site, target a car, and pull the trigger. With a tight beam pattern that varies from just a few inches wide to a few feet, police officers can use LIDAR guns to measure the speed of individual, specific vehicles in heavy traffic. This solved both usability problems that traditional radar guns face. However, unlike radar waves, the pulses that laser guns send out are extremely narrow – you can think of them literally like the beam from a laser pointer. LIDAR guns send out pulses of light (instead of radar) and measure vehicle speed based on the returned “reflection” pulses that bounce off of cars. Advantages of Laser over RadarĪt the most basic level, laser guns operate in a similar way to radar guns. But none of them can provide the instant, pinpoint accuracy of a LIDAR gun. Radar gun manufacturers deal with the traffic problem in different ways – some radar guns simply show the speed of the car moving fastest, and others can show the speed of three or four cars simultaneously. However, they will sometimes not be able to pinpoint target a randomly selected car from traffic. Contrary to one popular myth, this does not mean that radar guns cannot detect speed at all – they still can. But on crowded city roads, radar waves will be hitting many different cars simultaneously. On a deserted highway where there may only be one car at a time, the width of the radar waves is not a problem. This same “broadness” is also what causes radar guns problems in heavy traffic. This is what radar detectors are actually picking up most of the time when they alert – the radar “reflections” from a police officer shooting someone else up ahead of you. Since these waves are wide and can travel for great distance, even though a police officer might be aiming at one particular car, the radar waves will continue to travel and bounce off of terrain and other objects for several miles. Radar waves are by nature physically “wide” – if someone is shooting a radar gun at a tree one mile away, the radar waves emitted by the gun will also strike every other tree within a few hundred feet of the one being aimed at. Radar guns emit broad waves and measure speed by timing the return “reflection” from these waves bouncing off of cars. From a usability perspective, there are really two primary problems with radar – it has difficulty with heavy traffic, and it can be detected by radar detectors from a very long range away.īoth usability problems with radar are caused by fundamental principles of how they work. And why not? It was relatively cheap, accurate, easy to use, and reliable. Over several decades of successful use, radar had established itself as the go-to speed measurement tool for law enforcement officers. But over the last fifteen years, a new type of speed enforcement technology has become more and more popular – LIDAR, which is more commonly known as “laser” to the average driving enthusiast. Most people are familiar with the concept of handheld radar guns being used for speed enforcement – traditionally, this is how speed readings were always obtained. Interestingly, of all the questions that are submitted, perhaps none is more common than, “What’s the difference between Radar and Laser?”
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Radar detection and ticket avoidance can be a confusing subject sometimes – that’s the whole reason we created Radar University. One of the most interesting things about being a radar detector manufacturer is that we get to see what the most common support questions are that come across our help desk.