Radenso Theia vs. the Spectre Elite Radar Detector Detector

Radar detector detectors like the Spectre Elite are designed specifically to detect radar detectors. Ever wondered how RDD’s work? Will Theia be undetectable to RDD’s?

Radenso just published an amazing video going over RDD’s. In this video, they explain exactly how radar detector detectors work and then gave us a look at what we can expect with their upcoming radar detector, Theia.

This is a 45 min long in-depth video chock-full of awesome content. I’m sure any fellow engineers will love the teardowns and technical explanations as well. Here’s a few key takeaways from the video, including some details from the very end that are especially impressive.

Is Theia Undetectable?

Cutting right to the question that so many of you have asked, yes, Theia will be RDD immune and undetectable. Woohoo! It’s much more stealth than detectors like the Uniden R7 and more on par with the Escort Redline EX or Escort Max Ci 360 which are the benchmarks in stealthy detectors.

The Spectre Is Detectable

Now the Spectre is essentially a modified radar detector. Instead of being tuned to detect police radar guns, it’s been designed to look for the signals unintentionally leaking out of the local oscillator (LO) inside of other nearby radar detectors.

Like a traditional radar detector, the Spectre itself also unintentionally leaks a signal from its own LO. It turns out that signal is super strong, on par with the Kustom Falcon HR which is an actual police radar gun that intentionally radiates. It’s a really strong signal, one that can potentially be picked up from quite a distance away…

Theia Can Detect the Spectre

Remember how I mentioned that the Spectre leaks too? Well Theia is capable of both detecting and uniquely classifying Spectre emissions. This means that Theia not only be stealth to RDD’s itself, but it will also be a radar detector detector detector (an RDDD or RD³ as Rob called it in the video). 😀

An RDDD would essentially become a police car detector. When any police officer is actively running a Spectre, even if they weren’t transmitting radar or laser at the time, the Radenso Theia will be able to give you advanced warning to let you know they’re approaching. Wow…

The Spectre has some pretty strong emissions around 22.1 GHz or 26.4 GHz, just outside of the K band range. Most RD’s can’t scan that low or high and thus wouuldn’t be able to detect the Spectre’s strong emissions. That said, I have seen the Escort Redline false to some weak harmonics in Ka when getting extremely close to the Spectre Elite (video here) so it would be feasible for possible for other detectors to get some kind of alert. (There are some Cobras that offer VG-2 or Spectre I detection, but nothing currently that can alert you from a reasonable distance to modern RDD’s like the Spectre Elite while remaining undetectable themselves.) Either way, it looks like the upcoming Radenso Theia will be able to not only detect the different Spectres, but also give you a unique alert letting you know there is a an officer with an RDD up ahead. That’s amazing…

Once Theia is finally released, I’ll definitely be testing out the production radar detector against different Spectres to ensure it is truly stealth in practice and what the Spectre Alert feature is like assuming they build it in. In the meantime, things are looking incredibly promising.

I’ll keep you posted for sure as soon as Theia is available for pre-order.

Finally, thank you to Radenso for spending time educating us and taking the time to share the knowledge they’re learning through their own R&D! I personally love seeing the engineering going on behind the scenes. 🙂