Wireless
Radar
Detector
As the name suggests, a wireless radar detector has no connecting cables, in
particular, the power cable. These types of RD's draw their power from
batteries.
The advantages
with a wireless RD is that portability between cars is simple, and most
wireless RD's can fit in a shirt pocket. They have no cords to hide,
no messy wiring and are perfect for situations such as hire cars. Many
cars these days are also lacking in a cigarette lighter, or don't have it
positioned in a radar convenient location.
The disadvantage
is that running on batteries, the RD's must conserve power as much as
possible, and this means lower sensitivity. While it is certainly possible to
build a wireless radar detector that can match the performance of a
cigarette lighter powered model, it would drain the power from its batteries
before you even had a chance to encounter a speed trap.
This means there
is a trade-off between sensitivity (performance) and battery life.
The best analogy
was made by Don Rich from Beltronics himself; "It's no different than comparing a laptop to a desktop
computer," he says. "If you want go-anywhere, cordless convenience, you give up a little in performance. It's a tradeoff many are willing to make, particularly if they travel frequently and need the ultimate in portability."
In order to preserve battery life, every
cordless RD has a duty cycle;
which means it shuts down for a period of the time to conserve power. This
shut-down time is only milliseconds, so you won't actually notice the
detector "off" and any one time, but this cycling lowers the sensitivity of
the RD. Worst effected is Ka band, being such a wide range of
frequencies to scan through, takes powered detectors a reasonable amount of
time to scan before being compromised with duty cycles from a cordless.
So no matter what
model, there will always be a trade-off from battery life to sensitivity or
performance, and to date, no wireless model is
radar detector detectors
immune.
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