FAQ’s

This is quite normal. The police are only emitting a signal when they are pulling the trigger and firing at people. Sitting in the vans for 8 hours a day, day in and day out, the operators get very good at judging the speed of a passing car and if everyone is gingerly driving by at say the 30mph limit then they will not be bothering to fire their laser guns at people.

Believe it or not, sometimes the vans are just targeting excessive speed or the fastest car on the road at any given time and they have to suspect you for speeding in order to have the right to infringe your privacy by taking a speed reading.

Although the police cars and police mobile vans display a camera symbol which we associate as a speed camera sign they are also required to display this sign when using ANPR cameras, short for Automatic Number Plate Recognition. This is a system which reads car number plates as you pass and checks the registration against various databases to confirm that the vehicle is registered, has valid Road Tax, Insurance and an MOT. It also checks against data to see if they car has been reported stolen or used in any crimes such as driving off without paying for petrol. You will often see this system deployed with police cars or motorbikes on slip roads or further up the road to pull people over whose car is of interest to the police on one of these databases.

Heated front windscreens like those on Fords and Jaguars are fine. These windscreens have little metal elements in the glass but the unit can see between them without any additional accessories being required. It is heat reflective glass that you get on mostly French cars which is a problem.

Most probably; many modern French cars and a few high spec German models actually have a heat REFLECTIVE windscreen which has a metal coating all the way over the glass which is designed to reflect the suns UV rays and keep the car cool. However, it also reflects satellite and radio signals. Your windscreen would have a purple tint if it had this and it would require you to mount a little antenna up behind the rear view mirror for satellite reception where the windscreens are free of this coating.

A laser detector is designed to work on the premise of detecting laser scatter from a police speed gun being fired at cars on the road ahead of you. It is a bit like the police flashing a torch beam down the road so if you're behind the target car you will detect some scatter. As laser is working at the speed of light, if the police target you with a laser gun you have little chance of getting an advanced before they will have attained a speed-reading from you.

In most instances you would have to be lucky to get some scatter from cars being targeted in front of you but you can drive defensively and improve your chances such as not being the lead car in the outside lane of the motorway all the time and drive behind others instead. If you are in a situation of having 6 or 9 point on your licence or more then we tend to advise that every little bit of help available to protect your driving licence is worth having, just understand that it's not guaranteed.

These are like the traditional Gatso cameras that photograph you from the rear except they are portable and are setup on a tripod a bit like an old box brownie photography camera. They are generally only deployed at motorway roadwork's where the road is temporarily coned off to enforce a 50mph limit or similar. These work on radar so to get alerts to them you need something that detects radar. Most products do not offer radar detection these days because it is an outgoing technology and with radar detection you get false alerts from other traffic management systems that use the same frequencies such as pedestrian crossing monitors and automatic door sensors at supermarkets and petrol stations. Some long-term roadwork's can have mobile cameras added to the database of known mobile sites but for most instances these cameras are setup randomly at one-off locations as roadwork's come and go.

Unfortunately there is no way to detect if a police car is following you. These cars use systems called ProVida or VASCAR, but basically they are just pacing you down the road against their own speedometer with a video camera for evidence, they do not emit any signals. If they were trying to fire radar or laser at you they would only get the balance between yours speed and theirs, which may even be a negative number if they are trying to catch up with you!

The rules here vary slightly between whether the mobile trap is being operated by the police or a safety camera partnership. If it is a safety camera partnership then they will need to have done some research to justify that there is an issue with speed on a particular road, but this road could be several miles long and they do not need to say that they will be at a specific site on any given day. Some local knowledge will tell you that they always park up in a particular lay-by or bus stop and if this site is common used it can be identified as such add added to a database of known mobile sites.

Some camera partnerships will be a bit more specific about their operations in order to promote some openness about their work. The police can setup a speed trap at any location or catch you for speeding anywhere and if they see a crime being committed they have a duty to respond. Similarly the police do not say that they will be monitoring a particular street for burglaries at any given time.

If you want radar detection then you can install a Cheetah Sentinel on a motorbike. The audio/visual display unit has an earpiece socket which can be hooked up to an intercoms system and can also be battery powered and kept in your pocket if you wish. For a GPS based device then the Road Angel Plus is portable, battery powered, has an earpiece socket and you can get a specific bike-mounting cradle for the unit. It is not waterproof however.