Radar Detector Information

Updated September 2009

Page: 5 of 6

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Radar Detector Links

Connect with other radar-detector users

RadarDetector.net is the best user-to-user help site we've found. It focuses on everything related to radar detectors and offers unvarnished (and sometimes uncensored) discussions that can be useful, but might not be for the faint of heart. The outlaw image of radar detectors is certainly alive and well here.

Red-light cameras by the numbers

More than 400 communities in the U.S. have installed speed/red-light cameras -- and the number is rising. Check out this up-to-date list from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety to find out if your community is one of them. New GPS-equipped radar detectors and other devices are designed to warn you about these cameras.

Dodge tickets with your iPhone or car GPS

Although they don't detect radar or laser, several anti-speed-trap apps for the iPhone get good reviews. The app iRadar (*Est. $10) warns you about speed/red-light cameras -- before they can snap your photo and mail you a ticket. It loads a database onto your iPhone with the GPS coordinates of more than 6,000 of these cameras, and you get a warning whenever you approach one. The experts at Speed Management Laboratories like iRadar, which successfully warned them of cameras over 4,000 test miles in multiple states.

The New York Times' Gadgetwise blogger Roy Furchgott says he runs the free Trapster app on his iPhone. Users make note of speed traps, red-light cameras, sobriety checkpoints and more, and Trapster gathers all of these GPS coordinates and turns them into alerts for other Trapster drivers. The New York Times' Bits blogger Jenna Wortham says a similar free app, NMobile, checks user reports against news reports and public records.

If you have a Garmin or other GPS navigator in your car, you can download a database full of more than 3,500 speed and red-light camera locations in North America from POI-Factory.com (*Est. $5, or free to active members). Newsweek technology columnist Daniel McGinn says this popular database is an example of "fuzzbusting" becoming more mainstream.