Judging from dire pronouncements issued by the Chicken Little contingent,
the arrival of POP-mode radar poses a huge threat to speeders. Introduced
by MPH Industries on their BEE III moving radar late in 2000, this
feature allows the radar to transmit in bursts too brief for detectors
to hear it.
In 2003 the feature was added to a stripped-down BEE III variant, the Enforcer, and later to a pair of hand-held K-band Z-Series MPH radar guns. None of these radar models is a hot seller. The BEE III and Enforcer account for perhaps three to five percent of the national market for two- and three-piece moving radars. The Z-Series hand-held models represent an equivalent percentage of that class nationwide.
We first tested a BEE III and POP mode in January 2001 and found
that it worked pretty much as advertised. As luck would have it,
later we were commissioned by one of the dominant U.S. radar
gun manufacturers to do an extensive field test of two of their
new radars and three competing units, the BEE III included. This
entailed spending over two hundred man-hours on the road with the
units and conducting detailed field trials to quantify their performance.
Since the BEE III touted their POP mode, we tested that as well.
Although one detector manufacturer until recently dismissed the reliability
of POP mode as a technological impossibility, we'd have to say that
our testing confirms the manufacturer's claims. Not that we like
POP much--and MPH's fellow radar manufacturers have privately criticized
it as well.
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That's because strictly speaking, POP mode doesn't quite meet the requirements of radar
case law, legal guidelines established over several decades that
define how radar must perform and how it must be used. A basic tenet
of radar case law is that the officer must establish something called
tracking history. He does this by first visually estimating the
target's speed, then activating his radar. Particularly if other
traffic is present, he should then monitor the target speed and
listen to the target-speed audio Doppler for a few seconds--its
pitch is proportional to target speed-- to verify that both he and
the radar are looking at the same vehicle. At that point he can
lock the speed--although in many states this isn't required--and
take enforcement action.
With POP mode, he simply hits the transmit button once and a speed
instantly appears in the target speed window. There's no audio Doppler
and the speed disappears in a few seconds; it can't be locked. MPH does
caution in a prominent disclaimer in the operator manual that no
enforcement action is to be taken with a POP reading alone. Instead,
the officer is instructed to hit the transmit button a second time,
placing the radar in continuous-transmit mode, and conduct the normal
tracking history ritual. Most officers will follow this guideline. But some won't. And that's the problem.
MPH BEE III counting/display unit contains the microprocessor and visual displays that depict commands from the cordless remote control. The vertical, pale-green pictogram of a car denotes the cruiser's orientation. The small orange dot to its upper left depicts an oncoming target, the 20 mph speed. He slowed when he spotted the fuzz, but I'd already locked his 35 mph speed. |
Just as some officers routinely skip Step One: a visual estimate of target speed, before triggering the radar, many also shut off the audio
Doppler. No question that the high-pitched screeching is annoying--it
sounds a lot like fingernails on a chalkboard--but the rules say
he should be listening to it. Still, the officer knows full well
that if he testifies in court that he followed the rules, the defendant
will have a tough time proving otherwise.
With POP mode, the potential for abuse is obvious: hit a speeder
with POP, hand him the ticket and let him try to convince the judge
that the officer was cheating. For that matter, it's inconceivable
that most officers would even volunteer that they'd used POP mode.
Why buy trouble? Net effect: bad tickets will be written. Not many,
probably, but eventually a smart defense attorney is going to find
out that not only is the engineering concept behind POP just shaky
enough to raise a reasonable doubt, but the feature has never been
tested for accuracy by the Federal Communications Commission, the
bureau that approves all such equipment, or the joint International
Association of Chiefs of Police/NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), the group that tests and certifies speed-measuring equipment for accuracy.
But that's in the future. At the moment, the questions are: 1)
How big of a threat is POP right now? 2) How big a threat is it
likely to become? and 3) How long will it take the detector industry
to get a handle on it? After some months of investigating, we'd
say the answers are 1) Not very, 2) Just big enough to be a nuisance
and 3) Depending upon the manufacturer, it varies.
Here's why. By mid-2004 we'd managed to locate fewer than
100 POP radar among the state highway patrols in the 48 contiguous
United States. There's no way to canvass the 17,000-odd county and
municipal law enforcement agencies but we'd hazard a guess that
they might account for perhaps another 300 units. So let's say there
were 400 total by the late summer of 2004, nationwide, a number that a
bean counter would call statistically insignificant when compared
to the 100,000-odd radar units in service nationally.
Of course, if you happen to get ticketed by an officer packing POP-mode radar, that number becomes somewhat more significant. Still, these
radars just weren't there when we went looking for them. The Nevada Highway Patrol had the largest number of BEE IIIs: 77 in service by late 2004,
enough to equip about 40 percent of its highway patrol fleet.
No other state was using more than a handful: Florida, Montana,
Mississippi, Ohio and West Virginia had an average of ten each. By 2009 it's unlikely that the number had exceeded 2,000. Statistically, that gives you about a 1.5% chance of encountering an MPH radar with POP mode.
The limited distribution is more a function of MPH's struggling radar division than any product deficiencies. The BEE III is an expensive radar and it just don't have the sales force to aggressively market the product.
Regardless of the limited distribution of this POP radar, the radar detector
manufacturers have to react to what customers perceive to be a threat.
And given enough time, bolstered by the hype from self-proclaimed
Internet experts, perception eventually will become reality. For
that reason, five manufacturers had already stepped up to the plate
by early 2004 with POP-resistant radar detectors. (See our recent tests of new radar detectors able to detect POP radar, grouped by under $200 models, under $299 models and over $300 models).
Naturally we were curious
to see if they'd got it right. So we gathered samples of every model
that claimed to be POP-capable and headed out for a field test. One
note here: the Escort 8500's case contained the guts of the 8500's
replacement, the Escort Passport 8500 X50, but since it hadn't been officially introduced yet, we agreed to simply refer to it as the Escort 8500. That said, keep in mind that if you've got an Escort Passport 8500,
it won't have POP protection nor did the remainder of the production
run. But this test is of the 8500 X50.
We tested them in the desert northeast of Phoenix on a straight
and level two-lane county highway with no traffic present. With
one detector at a time mounted on a test fixture atop the dash,
our 2003 Mercedes C230 target car was first parked exactly 4,500
feet away, facing the radar. Then the radar operator began triggering
the BEE III in POP mode once every 20 seconds, advising the other
driver by radio each time he transmitted. This was repeated ten
times for each detector and the number of times they alerted to
POP was recorded. The test then was repeated at the 3,000-foot and
1,500-foot marks. We declined to get any closer to the radar since
it was able to begin clocking the Mercedes at 1,600 feet and frankly,
the more range a detector can deliver against the BEE III, the better.
This is the last radar in the world you want to stumble upon unannounced.
The Rocky Mountain Radar RMR D312, as we expected from previous tests,
failed entirely to spot the POP radar. And since all RMR models
use the identical, Korean-built platform, we're confident that none
of the others will detect POP either.
The Cobra 9870 (the 9570 shares this platform, differing only
in features, and can be expected to have similar performance) had
middling success at 3,000 feet but proved ineffective at other ranges.
(We tested two 9870s and averaged the results, accounting for the
55 percent showing at the 3,000-foot mark.)
The Whistler DE 1783 (the DE 1793 uses the same platform) did the best
at ranges up to 3,000 feet but didn't spot the radar at 4,500 feet.
The BEL RX65 showed the best- balanced performance, spotting the
BEE 80 percent of the time at 3,000 and 4,500 feet and 40 percent
at 1,500 feet. The Escort Passport 8500 X50 narrowly trailed it.
Ka POP Mode Effectiveness
(Pct. denotes the number
of POP alerts observed during ten runs at each distance.
Target acquisition range = 1,600 feet) |
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From the results we'd say a few of the manufacturers have some
work to do on this issue. Fortunately, four of the five were able
to spot this Ka-band radar at a considerable distance, meaning that
so long as you're not the customer chosen to receive a POP-mode
blast, any of them could easily detect the BEE when it's operating
in continuous-wave mode.
At our Straightaway/Curves test site the BEL RX65 (the RX55 shares
this platform but lacks the zinc die-cast antenna and varactor tuning of the RX65 and has fewer features plus somewhat less performance) ranked first in BEE
detection, spotting it from 28,214 feet. The Escort Passport 8500 X50
was a close second at 28,139 feet and the Cobra 9870 ranked third
at 27,290 feet. Following this were the Whistler 1783 at 23,636
feet with the RMR D312 lagging far behind at only 11,582 feet. When
we repeated the test at the Curve Test site, the POP-detection range
of the Cobra 9870 and RMR D312 both fell into the 800-foot range,
giving precious little time to react to the radar as it picked off targets
when they hove into view at 650 feet.
The Whistler 1783 fared much better while the BEL RX65 and Escort
8500 X50 trumped its range by an additional 50 percent. The performance
of the latter two, coupled with their superior ability to spot POP
radar from nearly a mile away, make these two the best in the business
at countering POP radar.
Author's note:
A respected source for all major brands of radar detectors is
BuyRadarDetectors.com, folks I've found over the years to be utterly reliable and very price-competitive. Better yet, these guys have an encyclopedic knowledge of radar detectors, something too rarely seen on the Internet. |
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