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Americans who live near state borders,how do you notice you've crossed the border?
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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Yes! When you cross into Virginia one is greeted with signage expressing radar detectors are illegal.
Yes indeedy! And to turn on your lights if your wipers are on, and to buckle up, and your speed may be monitored by aircraft. But pay no mind to the aircraft signs. The program ended up being way too expensive and they just never took the signs down. But do watch out for those cut throughs between the trees along the interstates because staties absolutely are hiding in there hoping for easy pickins.
And some have radar detector detectors. Turn your device off if you don't want an extra $100 added to your speeding ticket.
Thankfully, I’m protected by my radar detector detector detector.
I still like to imagine fighter jets or attack helicopters swooping in to blow up speeders, or in more modern times drone strikes
This is perfect, because I vaguely remember the Virginia signs reading, “ speed enforced by aircraft.”
Just owning them or actually using them? What are the fines?
It’s illegal to own one in Virginia. If you’re from another state where they are legal you’re supposed to take it off your windshield or at the very least turn it off if you have a more built-in kind. I remember they used to be relatively common in the ’90s and early ’00s but I really don’t see them very often anymore, so I don’t know if that’s as much of an issue nowadays.
Do those detectors even work against LIDAR? A lot of police use that now anyway.
Keeping in mind that I haven’t looked into this in over 20 years, back then the answer was technically yes but practically not really, or at least not well, and I’d be surprised if the answer has changed much in the intervening years. Radar has a fairly wide beam and most systems, at least at the time, would just leave it on all the time, so it would be pretty easy for a radar detector to pick up the signal while it was targeting other cars, well before the car with the detector would be targeted. This would typically give the driver time to slow down before they were targeted. By contrast, LiDAR uses a much narrower beam. IIRC the width of the beam even at some of the farthest effective distances was still about 3-feet (≈1 meter) wide or less, and the officers were trained to aim at where the front license plate would be. That meant it was quite likely that the targeted vehicle would absorb or reflect most if not all of the signal. On top of that, the LiDAR guns would only be active for a few seconds, so even if there was rogue signal that made it past the targeted vehicle there would only be a very limited window for the detector to observe it. It’s absolutely possible for the detector to pick up the frequencies being used, but more than likely if it was detecting a signal it would be because an officer was in the process of getting the vehicle’s speed so any alert would be coming too late.
Valentines work
https://www.valentine1.com/v1-detectors/