Being a high mileage driver (approx 34,000 p.a.), I like many other drivers am becoming increasingly concerned about the proliferation of speed cameras, so called Safety Partnership mobile units, and the governments new proposals for penalising speeding drivers. I wouldn't consider myself a speed demon, but in common with most people I occasionally stray.
About 12 years ago I bought a Uniden RD6000W radar detector which was an American company. The unit casing was metal, and the quality of it was first class. It served me well for the year that I had it, before I sold it when I sold my car.
Now that I am a car owner again, and a high mileage driver, I wanted to afford myself the protection of such a device. As it appeared that Uniden no longer made detectors, I opted for the Snooper S5-R which is made by Performance Products of Runcorn - a device which is supposedly the culmination of years of research and development. I had my doubts about its likely performance, as the few internet reviews etc that I could find seemed to rate it highly, but on digging a bit further, often seemed to come from sites that were affiliated/sponsored by the manufacturer. However, I decided to give it a shot, as surely any detector had to be better than none at all.
Halfords were selling them at £209.99, but they came down to £195 as they do price matching against competitors, so a deal was done.
Without trying to bore you with the technical details, the detector has 3 'logic' settings which filter out different unwanted signals that can give the driver false alerts. The expected performance of the Snooper S5-R is documented on many websites, but in reality, I found these to be vastly overstated. Snooper are however, very careful to state on their literature that the detector will pick up Gatso's, radar guns etc, UP TO a certain distance. My experiences with this detector are somewhat different...
In the week that I kept this detector for, I did not get the opportunity to try it against a hand-held police radar gun, but as these are very easy to pick up, I'm sure the detector would have performed well and given me plenty of warning. What I really bought the detector for was to pick up those sneakily positioned Gatso cameras. On this front, I expected the Snooper S5-R to give me at least a few seconds warning on approaching the Gatso to get my speed down. The actual results were -
On approaching the Gatso from the rear (as would a speeding driver) in a 60mph limit, the detector gave a 1 second warning (if lucky), in a 70mph limit it didn't warn me until I was level with the camera. I would imagine that doing 10mph over the limit in a 70 zone, most drivers would not be booked for this. They might well be booked if they were were travelling at more than 10mph above the limit, at which point, I found the detector to be absolutely useless as a driver would never have time to react. Yes the detection can be affected by atmospheric conditions, but I found that on a good day, I might get one & a half seconds warning as compared to the usual none-to-one second. As far as Laser detection goes, I knew upon buying the product that Laser detection would be next to useless anyway - yes the detector would pick it up easily enough, but by the time it picks it up, the police have taken your speed anyway.
The Snooper S5-R was the biggest waste of £195 ever. It was effectively as good as useless at speed detection, was cheaply built, and in my opinion, a healthy pair of eyes provide far superior speed detection. Not only was it useless at providing speed trap detection, it had a mind of it's own and rarely stopped beeping and flashing - even on the 'logic 3' setting which was supposed to filter out most unwanted false alerts, it beeped on and off at random and annoyed me constantly! Like a Snooper saleman I met on the Snooper stand at a well known motorshow a few years back, their products talk-the-talk, sound great, but fail to deliver on all counts.
Fortunately, I was able to take mine back to the shop after one week and get a refund. I was lucky, as I know that most car accessory retailers (including the one I bought from) are most reluctant to refund money for a radar detector and you would probably be stuck with it. The woman at the till must have liked me, so I'm now going to put the money towards something a little more useful - motorcycle lessons!