What You Should Know About Radar - Valentine One V1 Gen2 Owner's Manual

What you should know about radar

How Traffic Radar Works
Traffic radar uses a radar beam to measure speed. Think of the beam as a
searchlight. It's invisible because it's made of microwaves instead of light,
but otherwise it acts very much like a light beam. It travels in straight lines.
It's easily reflected. It scatters as it is passed through dust and moisture in the
air. And—this is essential—it has to hit your car before it can determine your
speed.
Radar can't see around corners or through hills. It can't see you when you
are behind another vehicle. When in the clear, how strongly your vehicle
reflects determines how far the radar can read your speed. Generally, larger
vehicles reflect more strongly than smaller vehicles. Trucks are "visible" on
radar farther away than cars.
The principle on which radar operates is absolutely reliable. Radar
equipment, on the other hand, is only as good as the quality of its design and
manufacture. Traffic radars tend to be unreliable. They're cheaply made and
therefore vulnerable to many interferences that cause false readings. And,
compared to the military and weather radar which have rotating antennas,
traffic radars are vastly simplified. This simplification means that traffic radar
cannot tell one car from another. The operator has to do that, and since the
operator can't see an invisible beam any better than you can, he frequently
doesn't know which vehicle's speed is being read. This is a source of many
undeserved tickets.
How Radar Detectors Work
A radar detector works like a radio tuned to microwave frequencies.
Valentine One Gen2 is an extremely sensitive radio, and it's tuned exactly to
the frequency bands used by all traffic radar in the U.S.: X band, K band and
Ka band which includes photo. Moreover, it has two antennas, one aimed
forward and one rearward, so that it can locate the radar.
Because Valentine One Gen2 is so sensitive, it can easily find radar from the
scattering of the beam, and it can find these scatters a long time before the
actual beam hits your car. The only exception is instant-on radar.
15