Radar and Laser Jammers
Before going further, let us make the following statement; jamming or attempting to jam a police radar gun is a federal felony with fines up to $75,000. While radar jammers are marketed, speedzones.com and our observations in El Paso show them to be totally ineffective, which is possibly the reason that their makers, while having been issued cease and desist orders by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), have not been prosecuted.

Laser jamming is another issue altogether. First, lasers are regulated not by the FCC but by the Food and Drug Administration and are considered separate from radar jammers. When effectively deployed, especially in conjunction with a high-performance conventional radar/LIDAR detector, laser jammers or shifters, as some manufacturers call them, can be very effective in rendering many laser guns ineffective within their legal operating parameters.

Jurisdictional Notes
The state of Virginia, the District of Columbia, and most of the Canadian provinces ban the use of radar/laser detectors. To enforce these laws, all these jurisdictions have deployed radar-detector detectors (RDD) to sniff out vehicles using radar/laser detectors. The first units went by the name of VG-2 and could detect the local oscillator emissions of traditional radar detectors. This forced detector manufacturers to change their designs to conceal these emissions, thus making them invisible to the VG-2 RDDs.

There are federal statutes that make radar jammers illegal in all 50 states. California, Minnesota, and Utah specifically ban radar and laser jammers, and it's possible that laser jammers may become outlawed soon in other states as well. Long-haul professionals get no break at all: Since February 1995, radar detectors have been banned in 18-wheel commercial vehicles in all 50 states.

Brief History of Speed Enforcement
While radar as a means of enforcing speed limits has been used since the end of World War II, it came into widespread use in the 1950s as the Interstate highway system was built. Working on what's called the Doppler Shift, all conventional radar guns work by reflecting a microwave signal off an object. By measuring and recording the shift in frequency between the original and reflected signal, the radar gun gives a precise measurement of the target vehicle's speed.

Although its stated purpose has been to promote highway safety (thus the roadside signs you see stating "Radar Used for Your Protection"), using radar for speed enforcement often has a secondary, more insidious purpose: revenue generation. In the early 1970s, with the advent of the national 55-mph speed limit after the first Arab oil embargo, revenue rather than safety has often become its primary goal. Current evidence of this can be seen with photo radar units. These are unmanned speed traps where vehicle speed is measured and the license plate of the offending vehicle is photographed. The ticket is sent in the mail. Although outlawed in many jurisdictions, photo radar remains a real threat.

Radar Love: A torrid affair with X, K, Ka, and LIDAR
The airwave-regulating FCC first authorized X-band for speed radar guns. Since X-band shares the spectrum with a variety of devices, such as garage-door openers, detectors often pick up random signals, causing annoying false alarms. As no surprise, only about 10 percent of guns currently use this band since it's being phased out.

When radar detectors became common, law-enforcement agencies began to look for alternative guns and turned to more sophisticated, high-performance K-band units with several variations, including Ka.

Radar detectors soon caught up with K- and Ka-band radar guns, and law-enforcement agencies felt outgunned, leading to the implementation of Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) laser devices to measure speed. With LIDAR, the speed of a targeted vehicle can be measured in less than a third of a second. If used in an instant-on mode, aimed at your front plate or the reflector elements of your headlamps, LIDAR is all but undetectable. Overnight, conventional radar detectors lacking LIDAR capability became obsolete.

"There are some new threats to deal with," says Carl Fors, president of Speed Measurement Laboratories (SML), a product evaluation and development research company with more than 18 years of experience. "Radar and laser speed-enforcement guns have changed dramatically since our last test in 2001. For instance, the performance of radar-detector detectors has improved significantly. In this evaluation, three RDDs were provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety and operated by Texas State Troopers. Vehicles were driven at 30 mph, and, when detected, the test vehicle was told to stop. Its range was determined by a Kustom Pro III laser gun."