Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
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Reading the article below brought back to mind something I might want to buy even though I don't typically speed (much). I was probably saved by one recently, one which wasn't even in my vehicle.
On a 45mph 4-lane street, I saw a very cool looking luxury sports sedan of a make and model I didn't recognize ahead of me which was going probably about 55mph. I sped up to see if there was a badge on the trunk. There wasn't, so I sped up and drew up to its left side in the left lane to see if there was a badge on the front hood. Just as I did, the car slowed down significantly, so I did, too. I pulled in front of it, back into the right lane, and then went back to paying more attention to my driving even though the rubber necking on my part hadn't been particularly unsafe. Now going the speed limit or below, I couldn't make out in my rear view mirror the badge on the front of the very low slung car.
Then, after rounding a long, gradual curve in the road, there was a speed trap sitting on a side street.
Any comments on whether reasonably priced ($100 and under) radar/laser detectors are a toy worth having? The Amazon reviews of various ones in that price range are all over the place making me think poor quality control, bad out of band RF rejection in RF cluttered areas, inability to discriminate between X-band police radar signatures and those of X-band radar sensors long-used on auto-open store doors, owners not realizing that "false alarms" weren't false, they just never saw the threat, etc.
The Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame: Electrolert Fuzzbuster Radar Detector
The road to the first automotive radar detector began when a radar engineer was stopped by traffic police for speeding - 27 Dec 2018
https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-...of-fame-electrolert-fuzzbuster-radar-detector
There were consumer radar detectors that preceded the one that Dale T. Smith built in 1968. Radatron Corp. is credited with marketing one in 1960 that was certainly among the first, if not the first. But Smith had several advantages when he built his. He was an electrical engineer who had experience working on radar systems for the U.S. Air Force, a fact that might explain why his radar detector worked very well. His timing for getting into the market was pretty good, as U.S. police departments then were making increasing use of radar guns to detect speeding.
Finally, Smith had a flair for marketing. The name he came up with for his detector—the Fuzzbuster—perfectly combined the product’s function with a dose of the antagonism that many motorists felt toward traffic cops. (Since the colloquialism is hardly used anymore, we’ll note that in contemporary parlance, police in those days were occasionally referred to as “the fuzz.”)
Part of the impetus for Smith building his radar detector was having been stopped for speeding himself. “I’ll never forget it,” he told the New York Times News Service in 1978. “Three cops came in from one of our local speedtraps. I checked out their system. It was 15 miles per hour out of calibration, and they had written $280,000 worth of fines. The three of them operating it—they could barely write their names.”
Smith knew what he was talking about. He’d actually helped invent the radar systems used by U.S. police to detect speeding, according to the November 1986 issue of Popular Mechanics, adding some delicious irony to the story. Details about Smith’s life are hard to find and harder to verify, however.
In 1968 in the United States, police radar guns operated in the X band, at 10.5 gigahertz (the FCC would later allocate space in the Ka and K bands). Smith started with a super heterodyne receiver that detected the signals at that frequency. He fitted it into a black box that was a little smaller than a cigar box. On the box’s front panel he installed a small light in a plastic dome. Drivers placed the Fuzzbuster on their dashboards. If the unit detected a radar signal, it activated the light.
It couldn’t have been any easier to use. Smith, however, was fond of noting that the simplicity was deceptive. “These are more than simply little black boxes. We’re talking about the same sophistication that is in the fire control mechanism of an F-14 fighter,” he told The New York Times in a 1977 interview.
Smith said the receiving range of the Fuzzbuster was four times that of the transmitting signal. Radar detector manufacturers differed on the maximum range of their products; some claimed three miles, others four. It didn’t matter, though, because Fuzzbusters reliably gave motorists more than enough time to slow down to the speed limit before police radar guns got a return signal and provided a reading.
From the start, Smith’s Fuzzbusters sold so well that just a few years later the term “fuzzbuster” was popularly applied even to competitors’ products. Electrolert, the company that Smith formed to manufacture his radar detectors, sold them for approximately US $100 each.
A further boost to sales occurred in 1974, when the U.S. government limited the maximum highway speed to 55 miles per hour. Hundreds of thousands of people rebelled against the reduction by buying radar detectors. Millions also bought Citizens Band radios, which were used by truckers and other motorists to alert one another to speed traps.
Why the disparity in sales numbers between the two devices? Use of CBs was entirely legal, while the use of radar detectors was a matter of ongoing judicial contention. In the early 1970s, some police even got away with confiscating or smashing them on the spot when found in a motorist’s car. There’s no way to tell how often that happened. But what is certain is that as time went on, motorists began reflexively removing the device from their dashboards before driving past police officers. Driving under the speed limit wouldn’t get you ticketed, but you might get stopped anyway and lose your detector.
By the end of the 1970s, the legal limbo was lifted. In most U.S. states, radar detectors were declared illegal for professional truckers, but legal for ordinary motorists. A few states and other jurisdictions, however, outlawed the devices completely.
There seems to be no independent verification of the size of the radar-detector market at the time, but by the late 1970s, news outlets accepted manufacturers’ claims—which were quite possibly exaggerated—that the total market was approaching a million units a year. At the time, Smith claimed the Fuzzbuster had anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of the market.
Origin of the term "fuzz" for police? All explanations I've found on-line are really lousy except for this one:
..."fuzz" apparently was genuine slang among drug users and other underworld types in the 1930's, since it is listed in several glossaries of criminal slang compiled at that time. Unfortunately, no one, even back then, has ever been able to pin down exactly where "fuzz" came from. One hypothesis in American Tramp and Underworld Slang, published in 1931, was that "fuzz" was derived from "fuss," meaning that the cops were "fussy" or "hard to please." This theory seems a bit overly genteel.
Other theories aren't much better. Etymologist Eric Partridge ventured that "fuzz" might have been rooted in the beards of early police officers, or perhaps in the idea of "mold" as a derogatory metaphor for the police. Yet another theory was that "fuzz" arose as a slurred pronunciation of the warning "Feds!" (Federal narcotics agents). None of these theories seems very likely.
My own hunch is that "fuzz" arose as a term of contempt for police based on the use of "fuzz" or "fuzzy" in other items of derogatory criminal slang of the period. To be "fuzzy" was to be unmanly, incompetent and soft. How better to insult the police, after all, than to mock them as ineffectual?
On a 45mph 4-lane street, I saw a very cool looking luxury sports sedan of a make and model I didn't recognize ahead of me which was going probably about 55mph. I sped up to see if there was a badge on the trunk. There wasn't, so I sped up and drew up to its left side in the left lane to see if there was a badge on the front hood. Just as I did, the car slowed down significantly, so I did, too. I pulled in front of it, back into the right lane, and then went back to paying more attention to my driving even though the rubber necking on my part hadn't been particularly unsafe. Now going the speed limit or below, I couldn't make out in my rear view mirror the badge on the front of the very low slung car.
Then, after rounding a long, gradual curve in the road, there was a speed trap sitting on a side street.
Any comments on whether reasonably priced ($100 and under) radar/laser detectors are a toy worth having? The Amazon reviews of various ones in that price range are all over the place making me think poor quality control, bad out of band RF rejection in RF cluttered areas, inability to discriminate between X-band police radar signatures and those of X-band radar sensors long-used on auto-open store doors, owners not realizing that "false alarms" weren't false, they just never saw the threat, etc.
The Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame: Electrolert Fuzzbuster Radar Detector
The road to the first automotive radar detector began when a radar engineer was stopped by traffic police for speeding - 27 Dec 2018
https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-...of-fame-electrolert-fuzzbuster-radar-detector
There were consumer radar detectors that preceded the one that Dale T. Smith built in 1968. Radatron Corp. is credited with marketing one in 1960 that was certainly among the first, if not the first. But Smith had several advantages when he built his. He was an electrical engineer who had experience working on radar systems for the U.S. Air Force, a fact that might explain why his radar detector worked very well. His timing for getting into the market was pretty good, as U.S. police departments then were making increasing use of radar guns to detect speeding.
Finally, Smith had a flair for marketing. The name he came up with for his detector—the Fuzzbuster—perfectly combined the product’s function with a dose of the antagonism that many motorists felt toward traffic cops. (Since the colloquialism is hardly used anymore, we’ll note that in contemporary parlance, police in those days were occasionally referred to as “the fuzz.”)
Part of the impetus for Smith building his radar detector was having been stopped for speeding himself. “I’ll never forget it,” he told the New York Times News Service in 1978. “Three cops came in from one of our local speedtraps. I checked out their system. It was 15 miles per hour out of calibration, and they had written $280,000 worth of fines. The three of them operating it—they could barely write their names.”
Smith knew what he was talking about. He’d actually helped invent the radar systems used by U.S. police to detect speeding, according to the November 1986 issue of Popular Mechanics, adding some delicious irony to the story. Details about Smith’s life are hard to find and harder to verify, however.
In 1968 in the United States, police radar guns operated in the X band, at 10.5 gigahertz (the FCC would later allocate space in the Ka and K bands). Smith started with a super heterodyne receiver that detected the signals at that frequency. He fitted it into a black box that was a little smaller than a cigar box. On the box’s front panel he installed a small light in a plastic dome. Drivers placed the Fuzzbuster on their dashboards. If the unit detected a radar signal, it activated the light.
It couldn’t have been any easier to use. Smith, however, was fond of noting that the simplicity was deceptive. “These are more than simply little black boxes. We’re talking about the same sophistication that is in the fire control mechanism of an F-14 fighter,” he told The New York Times in a 1977 interview.
Smith said the receiving range of the Fuzzbuster was four times that of the transmitting signal. Radar detector manufacturers differed on the maximum range of their products; some claimed three miles, others four. It didn’t matter, though, because Fuzzbusters reliably gave motorists more than enough time to slow down to the speed limit before police radar guns got a return signal and provided a reading.
From the start, Smith’s Fuzzbusters sold so well that just a few years later the term “fuzzbuster” was popularly applied even to competitors’ products. Electrolert, the company that Smith formed to manufacture his radar detectors, sold them for approximately US $100 each.
A further boost to sales occurred in 1974, when the U.S. government limited the maximum highway speed to 55 miles per hour. Hundreds of thousands of people rebelled against the reduction by buying radar detectors. Millions also bought Citizens Band radios, which were used by truckers and other motorists to alert one another to speed traps.
Why the disparity in sales numbers between the two devices? Use of CBs was entirely legal, while the use of radar detectors was a matter of ongoing judicial contention. In the early 1970s, some police even got away with confiscating or smashing them on the spot when found in a motorist’s car. There’s no way to tell how often that happened. But what is certain is that as time went on, motorists began reflexively removing the device from their dashboards before driving past police officers. Driving under the speed limit wouldn’t get you ticketed, but you might get stopped anyway and lose your detector.
By the end of the 1970s, the legal limbo was lifted. In most U.S. states, radar detectors were declared illegal for professional truckers, but legal for ordinary motorists. A few states and other jurisdictions, however, outlawed the devices completely.
There seems to be no independent verification of the size of the radar-detector market at the time, but by the late 1970s, news outlets accepted manufacturers’ claims—which were quite possibly exaggerated—that the total market was approaching a million units a year. At the time, Smith claimed the Fuzzbuster had anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of the market.
Origin of the term "fuzz" for police? All explanations I've found on-line are really lousy except for this one:
..."fuzz" apparently was genuine slang among drug users and other underworld types in the 1930's, since it is listed in several glossaries of criminal slang compiled at that time. Unfortunately, no one, even back then, has ever been able to pin down exactly where "fuzz" came from. One hypothesis in American Tramp and Underworld Slang, published in 1931, was that "fuzz" was derived from "fuss," meaning that the cops were "fussy" or "hard to please." This theory seems a bit overly genteel.
Other theories aren't much better. Etymologist Eric Partridge ventured that "fuzz" might have been rooted in the beards of early police officers, or perhaps in the idea of "mold" as a derogatory metaphor for the police. Yet another theory was that "fuzz" arose as a slurred pronunciation of the warning "Feds!" (Federal narcotics agents). None of these theories seems very likely.
My own hunch is that "fuzz" arose as a term of contempt for police based on the use of "fuzz" or "fuzzy" in other items of derogatory criminal slang of the period. To be "fuzzy" was to be unmanly, incompetent and soft. How better to insult the police, after all, than to mock them as ineffectual?
