Countering Photo Radar
By Craig Peterson
1/15/2002
Credit the Dutch for producing what's proved to be a major headache
for speeders: photo radar, also known as the speed camera. The Gatsometer or Gatso,
named after its Dutch inventor, Maurice Gatsonides, has become the
world's most popular automated enforcement tool, outselling its
rivals by a wide margin. Unlike conventional traffic radar, its
low-powered K-band beam is angled across the roadway, making it
exceptionally difficult to detect. But hardly impossible.
To determine just how much warning you can expect against this
Dutch menace we set up an impromptu test. With the cooperation of
the Denver police who agreed to park one of their photo radar vans
along a suburban two-lane street, we backed off to the limit of
the test site, some 1389 feet away, powered-up one detector at a
time and drove toward the van until an alert sounded. Then we measured
the distance with a Kustom Signals ProLaser III. Here's what we found. [See our latest review of 32 new detectors tested against the Gatso and Multanova photo radar (speed cameras).]
Our conclusion: tough to detect but any detector with good K-band
sensitivity is more than a match for the Gatso. But not for the stealthy Multanova or Redflex, unfortunately, as our recent speed camera detector test demonstrated.
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