The 8 Best Radar Detectors for 2024
These electronic copilots can pick up incoming speed traps and red-light cameras, and that’s just the beginning.
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The best radar detectors can do more than just protect you from being the target of police radar and laser guns and keep you from receiving a speeding ticket. The latest detectors have features such as Bluetooth to connect to smartphone apps to show real-time traffic or an accident on your route, as well as GPS to mark red-light camera locations.
But the primary purpose of any decent detector is to sniff out various types of police radar—X, K, and Ka bands and their sub-variants—and laser signals that measure a motorist’s speed.
How well these devices sense the presence of police radar, do it accurately and quickly at a long distance, and indicate the direction of the signal so that drivers can slow their speed depends mainly on a detector’s effective range and number of antennas. Other important factors that impact this device's usefulness are how effectively a radar detector can filter out annoying false alarms caused by random non-police radar signals, the simplicity of its operation, and how clearly it conveys information via visual and audible alerts.
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Best Radar Detectors
- Best Overall: Escort MAX 360c
- Most Affordable: Cobra RAD 480i
- Best Value: Uniden DFR7
- Best Radar Detector for Beginners: Uniden DFR9
- Best Display Radar Detector: Escort Redline 360c
The Expert: I’ve spent my entire journalism career testing car electronics and have owned several radar detectors going back to the mid-90s. As editor of Car Audio & Electronics magazine, I coordinated an annual radar detector test and have kept my eyes and hands on the products ever since, keeping tabs on new technology and features. I’ve also tested enough detectors over the years to get a sense of what makes them good or bad based on their controls and feature sets.
A Word of Warning
Before explaining how to pick a good radar detector, it’s important to point out that radar detectors are not universally legal in North America. In the United States, drivers are not legally allowed to use radar detectors in Virginia and Washington D.C. They’re also banned in most Canadian provinces, including Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.
The details of the laws vary from state to state, including the penalties for breaking them, so I strongly recommend turning your detector off and putting it away while driving through states where they are banned. Highway patrol and police frequently use radar-detector detectors to sniff out the presence of a detector, so using one in a state where it’s illegal may actually increase your chances of getting pulled over.
What to Look for in a Radar Detector
How Radar Detectors Work
Radar detectors allow you to find radar and laser signals used by law enforcement to measure vehicle speed. Using one feels like using an AM/FM radio: The receiver in the detector tunes into active radar signals, just like a radio tunes in to active radio station frequencies. In the U.S., law enforcement typically uses one of three radar and laser types–the X, K, and Ka bands.
X band is the oldest form of radar used by law enforcement and is now uncommon. Its successor, K band, operates on a higher frequency and has lower power output, making it more difficult to detect at long distance. Ka band has a narrower beam pattern and lower power output than both X and K band, which makes it the most difficult type of radar to detect at long distances.
Police laser guns emit short bursts of infrared light that reflect off a vehicle and return to the device. Unlike radar that can usually be detected in advance, police point lasers at a specific vehicle, so drivers don’t get advance warning.
Range
If you want to avoid getting a ticket, you will need a radar detector that notifies you of an upcoming checkpoint far enough in advance for you to slow down if you’re going over the limit. That means your radar detector’s range effectively determines how useful it can be. Some detectors only track 100 feet away, where others can sense many miles away.
At the same time, keep in mind that a detector’s effective range varies at any given moment based on dense objects that could cause interference, and even the weather. Given that, many companies avoid telling you a detector’s range and lean on non-specific terms like “long range.” To address that ambiguity, I’ve tested the radar detectors below to get a sense of their relative ranges and accuracy.
Antennas
A radar detector’s antennas are like its “ears.” They allow the detector to search for radar and lasers in many different directions. The best radar detectors will have more antennas for detecting radar, which means you get better protection. Detectors with a single antenna only look for radar in front of a vehicle. More expensive models with multiple antennas can look behind and to the sides. The best of the best offer 360-degree detection, but full coverage is expensive.
Visual, audible, and voice alerts
Different detectors have different ways of letting you know when they pick up a radar or laser signal. Some high-end detectors use voice alerts which tell you specifically what’s coming. Others make specific sounds for each threat (X, K, Ka, laser) that you’ll need to learn. Most detectors also have a small screen with visual guides that show you the radar type, the strength of the signal, and the direction from which it’s coming.
False alert filtering
Radar detectors will sometimes pick up radar signals from other devices and mistake those for police radar guns. Anything from a radar-controlled garage door opener to a microwave could trigger a false alert—even adaptive cruise control on another car. Radar detectors use software to filter out frequent false alerts, learning where they frequently occur, and every one of them has a mute button so you can manually silence false alerts.
City and highways modes (sensitivity and selectivity)
Some detectors with longer range will feature a “city mode” that reduces its sensitivity for city streets and more crowded areas. This allows you to reduce the potential for false alarms when driving in a highly populated area with more possibilities for interference and false alarms.
Some detectors also have a “highway mode,” which does the opposite–increasing its range possibly at the expense of accuracy. This allows you to get more of a heads up when you’re most likely to need it… ahem, like if you’re speeding. (But you’d never do that, right?)
Both of these modes adjust the detector’s selectivity, a related spec that refers to a detector’s ability to detect police radar while ignoring other radar sources that operate on neighboring frequencies. A detector with high selectivity can differentiate between radar and laser and other signals. The best radar detectors offer a good balance between sensitivity and selectivity, and use software to note spots with frequent false alerts and filter them out.
GPS
Radar detectors with GPS give you the ability to mark and save the locations on recurrent speed traps and red light cameras so it can alert you before it detects a signal. More advanced models can access databases with crowdsourced trap and camera location data to give you more accurate warnings outside your everyday driving area, though you typically have to subscribe and pay an annual fee to access them.
Some detectors with GPS can also automatically switch between “city” and “highway” modes based on how fast you’re going.
Instant-On protection
Some police radar guns feature “instant-on” radar, which shoots a quick signal burst that measures your driving speed before a radar detector could pick it up. Some radar detectors have a feature called “instant-on protection” that can sense instant-on radar if police use it on a vehicle ahead of you.
Smartphone app
Some radar detectors can sync with a companion smartphone app which unlocks additional features. Some allow you to mark speed traps and traffic cameras like you would with a GPS-enabled detector. App-based GPS may include additional information, like posted speed limits and real-time traffic alerts.
How We Tested Radar Detectors
To test these radar detectors, I rented a radar gun and went to a deserted community-college campus in Southern California on a weekend. My assistant pointed a K-band radar gun at my test car, a 2017 Audi Q7, while I drove up a hill with a slight curve so that the vehicle would have to drive into the radar gun’s line of sight about 100 yards away. This gave me a sense of how quickly each detector could discover the radar signal, and most were within a few yards of each other.
I also tested several of the detectors in Portland, Ore., while driving a 2023 Chrysler Pacifica, and as luck would have it—or maybe bad luck for drivers without a radar detector—while doing a loop on Interstate 84, I encountered not one but two police officers on opposite sides of the freeway shooting Ka band that lit up the detectors under test. Finally, I drove an urban loop to get a feel for how well the detectors picked up radar and false alerts and how well they filter them out. I assessed them while stopped to fully explore the feature range of each detector including their controls and user interface.
Doug Newcomb splits his time between Hood River, Ore., and Todos Santos, Mexico. He's been writing about technology and cars for more than 30 years for Wired, Rolling Stone, Road & Track, Automobile, PCMag.com, Playboy and numerous other publications. He cofounded the C3 Group in 2013 to produce automotive industry events in New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and at SXSW in Austin. C3 Group was acquired by Informa in 2018. When he's not writing, he's riding a surfboard