henry (12/12/82)
The radar guns that emit only when their trigger is pulled do have one big disadvantage. Joe Highway Patrol can't just sit back with half an eye on the traffic and half an eye on the readout: he has to sit up, take notice, and pull pull pull the blasted trigger. This makes the guns unpopular with the patrolmen, which is one of the reasons why they are not more widespread. There are worse things than radar guns or detector bans. Apparently some police forces were, at one point, seriously interested in the possibility of slowing drivers down by liberally sprinkling the fast highways with cheap radar emitters. Not radars, mind you, but just microwave noise sources in the police-radar bands. They would be directional enough to minimize interference with real radars, but would be a major pain to people with radar detectors. The FCC tromped on the idea: they didn't think this was enough of a justification for spraying the countryside with microwaves.