G
Guest
Here's the part of the test that deals with the Phazer passive jammer:
[From Car&Driver]
"The Passive Jammers
We were leery of another test of passive jammers after we'd shelled out $149 for the utterly ineffective "Eclipse" in our previous test. In the arena of avoiding speeding tickets, it worked as well as a voodoo doll with a pin plunged through its blue uniform. Nonetheless, these passive jammers are still being sold--even in ads in this magazine. We swallowed hard and ordered the two most visible ones: the $199 PHAZER, from Rocky Mountain Radar, and the $199 Mirage 2001 Radar Scrambler, from Jammers, Inc., a "retail sales division of Phantom Technology, Inc."
Our skepticism was rewarded. The radar guns did their clocking work totally unfazed by the Phazer, and the Mirage's jamming capabilities were indeed shown to be a mirage. Both manufacturers claim their devices will jam Ka-band, too. But our Ka-band Stalker gun remained similarly unaffected. We tried everything to get these things to work. We put them outside the car. We put the Phazer and the Mirage together and turned them toward the guns. We even hooked them up to a 12-volt battery and mounted them to a bicycle, with its greatly reduced frontal target area, and switched on the passive jammers. No luck--the guns clocked us normally, every time.
To be sure these devices were functioning at all, we brought the passive jammers up close to each radar gun. We switched on the gun, and indeed, its audio tone emits a bleeping sound of the type you might hear from a spacemobile on "The Jetsons." How this bleeping could possibly shield a car from radar, though, is beyond us. We parked the target car (with the passive jammer) bumper to bumper in front of the radar-equipped car, and then backed up. Almost as soon as we moved, the bleeping on the radar gun's audio was drowned out by the low moan of the target car's more powerful Doppler reflection. At 300 feet away, the bleeping noise isn't even powerful enough to hear with the target car parked.
The passive jammers aren't completely
valueless. Within 10 feet or so, we found that they could prevent the police radars from reading the tuning forks used to calibrate them. So if you're looking for a tuning-fork jammer for under $200, your prayers have been answered. This may explain why these passive jammers have found their way into respectable catalogs like The Edge and The Sharper Image: we bet that this experiment looks mighty impressive when performed on a conference-room table, or at an electronics trade show. Two phone calls to Sharper Image headquarters--we wanted to know if they had tested the jammers--were not returned."
[Car&Driver March 1996]
[From Car&Driver]
"The Passive Jammers
We were leery of another test of passive jammers after we'd shelled out $149 for the utterly ineffective "Eclipse" in our previous test. In the arena of avoiding speeding tickets, it worked as well as a voodoo doll with a pin plunged through its blue uniform. Nonetheless, these passive jammers are still being sold--even in ads in this magazine. We swallowed hard and ordered the two most visible ones: the $199 PHAZER, from Rocky Mountain Radar, and the $199 Mirage 2001 Radar Scrambler, from Jammers, Inc., a "retail sales division of Phantom Technology, Inc."
Our skepticism was rewarded. The radar guns did their clocking work totally unfazed by the Phazer, and the Mirage's jamming capabilities were indeed shown to be a mirage. Both manufacturers claim their devices will jam Ka-band, too. But our Ka-band Stalker gun remained similarly unaffected. We tried everything to get these things to work. We put them outside the car. We put the Phazer and the Mirage together and turned them toward the guns. We even hooked them up to a 12-volt battery and mounted them to a bicycle, with its greatly reduced frontal target area, and switched on the passive jammers. No luck--the guns clocked us normally, every time.
To be sure these devices were functioning at all, we brought the passive jammers up close to each radar gun. We switched on the gun, and indeed, its audio tone emits a bleeping sound of the type you might hear from a spacemobile on "The Jetsons." How this bleeping could possibly shield a car from radar, though, is beyond us. We parked the target car (with the passive jammer) bumper to bumper in front of the radar-equipped car, and then backed up. Almost as soon as we moved, the bleeping on the radar gun's audio was drowned out by the low moan of the target car's more powerful Doppler reflection. At 300 feet away, the bleeping noise isn't even powerful enough to hear with the target car parked.
The passive jammers aren't completely
valueless. Within 10 feet or so, we found that they could prevent the police radars from reading the tuning forks used to calibrate them. So if you're looking for a tuning-fork jammer for under $200, your prayers have been answered. This may explain why these passive jammers have found their way into respectable catalogs like The Edge and The Sharper Image: we bet that this experiment looks mighty impressive when performed on a conference-room table, or at an electronics trade show. Two phone calls to Sharper Image headquarters--we wanted to know if they had tested the jammers--were not returned."
[Car&Driver March 1996]
