I'll just say this....Laser jamming is completely and totally ineffective. It is a waste of your money. The very nature of said jamming(i.e. LOS) makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to jam. This is one of the reasons that it is so effective as a weapon targeting system. Any attempt to jam laser can easily be defeated.

Radar jamming is possible but only in active modes, 'passive' radar jamming would be ineffective. All active radar jamming systems are illegal under FCC rules and may very well effect your ability to have children at some point in the future.

The simple answer is the companies that make an market such systems are trying to scam you. It is a complete waste of time and money.

 

I'm an Early Warning (EW) Tech in the Navy. Detecting, analyzing, and jamming signals with some of the best gear a military budget can by is what I do. Nothing in the commercial market right now will jam or confuse anything but the the oldest police radar systems, which have all been replaced. The newer radar guns use very fast and effective digital processing, and you can forget about jamming or confusing laser with a pair of LED's.
Also note that most highway drivers do not abide by the speed limit and in many places it is normal to cruise at 10-20 mph over the limit if that is the flow of traffic. As long as your not making a lot of maneuvers or passing the cars around you a cop will usually leave you alone. My dad was Highway Patrol and I did a several ride alongs with him so I have some idea of how, when, and why they give chase. If you don't believe me or anybody else, test it yourself. Most officers find the chance to experiment with this stuff amusing, so just go to your local police office and see if anybody wants to take a shot at your car. Tell them it's part of an experiment for a comparison paper, then report your findings here.

 

Well, I see the local CHP and how they act with traffic and I tell you it's a crap shoot.

I was on the 118 just last week, doing 70 in a 65 (and this was a conservative speed, BTW) while traffic flow was 70-75. No one was passing or changing lanes.

A CHP motorcycle cop just runs up a lane and picks one out of the crowd.

There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's just like lions and zebras.

 

Sorry but it's true. The one article that you cite to claim their effectiveness has a number of fatal flaws. The most important of which is that it's over 2 years old, in the technology world this is almost two generations old. Very little can be drawn from it. You have to prove that the laser systems that they are testing against are actually used by a number of police forces. They didn't do that. In all their testing methodolgy is very weak. The go through the motions of doing proper testing, but in reality what they do is woefully inadequate. You need more detail in how the experiment is run and in what tests they rand and under what conditions. It appears they ran a rather simple set of experiments. The value you can draw from them is limited.

As to your 20+ 'hits' and never been caught. Think about that for a second. Have you ever run a laser detector? How many false positives did you get running those? I've seen the things go off from a number of sources. Now for laser detectors, having too many false positives is a bad thing because if you have too many you start to ignore them and come to realize that the detector is 'ineffective'. However a 'jamming' system has the opposite effect. False positives for a jammer can actaully be a positive thing because they give people the perception that the system is working. Afterall if my detector went off and I didn't get caught that must me that my 'jammer' is working, right?. But in realitity it may just be a false postive.

However because people with these 'jammers' keep getting false postives and keep not getting caught, they will think it works and they will tell others how effective the system is when in fact it may not be. This can actually increase sales based upon the perception that it is working even if it isn't. With laser jammers there is no reason to reduce false postives since they reinforce the belief that the system works. If anything you could argue that false postives may in fact be increased because of this property.

The reality is lasers are extremely hard to jam because of their nature. You're talking about a narrow focused beam, that is being bounced off and detected by a small sensor. For a jammer to work it would have to be transmitting a beam that happens to be lined up very closely with the laser beam coming from the laser gun. Even if this happens all the cop(or gun) has to do is change the wavelength of the laser it's transmitting to get around the interference signal your sending. Unlike with radar guns it's very easy for companies to alter the wavelengths. You don't need to liscense or use a frequency spectrum to do it. The short answer is that any an all techniques that 'might' work today will most likely not work in the future. It's just too easy to change the configuration of these laser guns to adapt and defeat the 'jammers' out there today. As technology gets cheaper and more and more military grade sensors/laser become affordable in such guns it will be even harder to beat them. It's an arms race that the consumer just isn't going to win.

If it makes you sleep better at night then feel free to buy one but honestly they will have very limited effectiveness and they will only become less efftive over time. Sucks but it's true. Fortunately very few police forces(at least here) use them.

 

I agree, an SOB picked me out for no good reason at all. He didn't even have the courtesy to ask why I was speeding or if I knew how fast I was going. He just asked for my license, walked back to his car, came back and told me to sign the ticket. I could have been rushing to my dying mother bedside at the hospital and he didn't even ask why. That's what gets me mad more. He doesn't even care. He was having a shitty day b/c he was catching speeders on a saturday and wanted to hurry up and go home.

 

I'm not one for jacking threads, and kinda feel that's where I've taken this but I do want to make a couple of comments.

Most of the points you make are infact true. Most if not all of these devices can be altered with firmware upgrades etc. But the truth is most small departments don't even use laser becuse of cost. The ones that do have the equipment they have and that's not always new.

The 20+ occasions I quoted you were on roughly the same spot on I-90 in Spokane where thay have been doing construction for over a year. The zone is heavily patroled and enforced. In one area around a blind bend they sit and have a shoot and chase deal setup where one guys shoots and reports to a chase officer.

Anyone and everyone that lives in this area can tell you people have been ticketed for as little as 6 MPH over the construction posted limit. The odds that I could go through this area, over the limit, been targeted, hit, alerted by this system installed and NEVER pulled over over 20 times speaks for itself. These hits have occured morning/noon/night when the traffic was light and I was out front.

I'd be the first guy to stand up and say I took it up the arse on this system if it didn't work but I can't say that. I've been driving for over 35 years and speeding for that long too.

Is this 100% effective against everything and all that's out there...Certainly not. Will devices be available to defeat MY deffence, Sure.

But right now this IS working for me and the proof is I've never been ticketed. And that's why I sleep good at night

 

I saw the Canada flag and got confused, Spokane as in Washington?

It makes sense that they would set up in a construction zone. Fines are doubled if not more there. Great for revenue generation.

Here in California, we have doubled fines. The funny thing is, I've seen the signs go up months before any work is actually done. So it obviously isn't done for worker safety.

Remember folks, if you see the construction signs, slow the hell down!

 

In South Carolina I've seen signs that read "Let them work, let them live."

WTH? It's like the driving public is oppresing the construction workers or something. They make it sound like we're purposefully running them over and stealing their tools and crap.

In atlanta, the interstate that loops the perimeter is called I-285. The posted speed limit is 55, but it's a six lane interstate. Does that make sense? People generally go 80 on it anyway, and if you attempt to do anything near 55, you WILL cause an accident and make people swerve out of your way. I think by the public's general concensus that the speed limit should be increased, should be equal to a vote by the people to raise the speed limit and our local representatives should vote in favor to do so. It would be different if just a few people were doing 75 or 80 and everyone else was doing 55-60, but everybody on the damn interstate is doing atleast 75.

 

[QUOTE=Cyclon36,May 2 2005, 03:51 PM] WTH?

 

A man was speeding down the highway, feeling secure in a gaggle of cars all traveling at the same speed. However, as they passed a speed trap, he got nailed with an infrared speed detector and was pulled over.

The officer handed the man a citation, and then as he turned to walk back to his cruiser, the man asked, "Officer, I know I was speeding, but I don't think it's fair. There were plenty of other cars around me going just as fast, so why did I get the ticket?"

"Ever go fishing?" the policeman asked the man.

"Um, yeah... so," the startled man replied.

The officer grinned and added, "Ever catch ALL the fish?"