My Morpheous Geodesy speed camera detector

The fact that I own a speedtrap detector illustrates how much has changed in recent years. When speedtraps were sensibly situated in appropriate 30mph zones, I had no issue with them and saw no reason to detect them. But it's a very different situation now that speedtraps have become a stealth motoring tax, and are hidden where they don't deter speeding but merely generate revenue from fines.

A forward-facing infra-red Gatso hidden behind a sign

In researching detectors, I looked at reviews by www.ukspeedtraps.co.uk, Auto Express and Evo magazine. Four detectors got top marks across the board:

• Valentine One (£580)

• Bel 990i (£400)

• Snooper SD715si (£200)

• Geodesy GPS (£380)

I originally opted for a radar/laser detector on the basis that they detected mobile traps as well as fixed ones. However, a few weeks of using the Snooper SD715si made me change my mind. Although its performance was assessed as the equal of the Valentine, and thus as good as it gets, the problem was that it gave very little warning. This meant that you were always driving a little on edge, expecting to have to panic-brake at any moment. Worse, as the radar unit in most Gatso cameras is facing away from you, they rely on reflected signals.

That's all well and good when there's something there to reflect them, but as I discovered on an empty motorway one Sunday evening, you get insufficient warning when doing <cough>mph when the camera is hidden behind a bridge and there's nothing in front of it to reflect the radar. Granted that the limited warning made the difference between a court appearance and a fixed penalty notice, I decided that the Geodesy was the way to go. I sold the Snooper for a tenner less than I paid for it and bought the Geodesy instead.

The Geodesy works on a completely different principle. Instead of detecting radar, it is a GPS unit with a built-in database of up to 17,000 camera locations. The advantage of this approach is that you can have as much warning as you like: since the unit already knows where the camera is, it doesn't have to wait until it detects it.

(The following description is based on the Geodesy Plus, with my chosen setting of a 1-mile alert. The default alert distance is 0.6 miles, but you can ask Geodesy to set it to anything you like, and it will be reconfigured next time you connect - see below.)

One mile before a camera, the first LED lights and you get a single beep to draw your attention to the fact that you are approaching a camera. For each 1/10th mile you travel towards the camera, another LED lights.

Half a mile before the camera, you have 5 LEDs lit and it now compares your speed with the speed limit at the camera location (the database includes the speed limits in force for each camera).

If you are within the speed limit, the LEDs continue to light, but the unit remains silent. If you are above the speed limit, the LEDs start flashing and the unit starts bleeping. The closer you get, the more urgent the bleeping becomes. Even in an open-topped car, there is no way you can miss the bleeping at maximum volume! As soon as you slow to within the speed limit, the bleeping and flashing cease.

Once you pass the camera, the LEDs turn green and count down from 10 back to zero as you get further away.

One weakness of the Morpheous is that it doesn't know anything about roads, it only knows how close you are to a camera. So if there is a camera in a side-road, you'll be warned as you approach it even though you will never pass it. For this reason, most owners recommend that you don't get too carried away with super long-range warnings!

The volume of the audio warning is also adjustable, up to a maximum of 93dB. I found that the default setting was much too quiet for an open-top car, especially when the stereo is on, so have had it whacked up to maximum.

Morpheous supplies two cradles as standard, once for a car, the other for a bike. Swapping the unit between the two is just a question of slipping it out of one cradle and into the other. You will, though, need to wire-in the bike cradle to a power-supply as it cannot run on batteries.

Geodesy (centre) mounted on my car dash

Updating the database is just as easy. Once you've connected the desktop cradle to a phone line and power, updating is as simple as slipping the Geodesy into the cradle. It detects the unit and automatically dials a national-rate number to connect to the Morpheous database. If it can't get through immediately, it retries every two minutes. In update mode, the LEDs are used to show the status of the call. You get a year's updates free, after that there's a charge of £30 per year.

The full www.ukspeedtraps.co.uk review can be found here. They gave it a Gold Award and a Highly Recommended rating.

The unit won't detect roadside laser checks, but then unless you are very lucky a laser-detector only goes off when you've already been zapped. The Rolls-Royce solution would thus be to fit a laser-jammer as well. This is moving into a somewhat greyer area of the law, so only you can decide whether you want to go that far.

You do get the occasional false alarm caused by cameras in side-roads, and you occasionally get less notice when you turn onto a road with a camera, but there have only been two cameras it didn't know about - even mobile cameras in motorway roadworks sections tend to be added to the database the day they are moved.

Very occasionally, the unit locks up. This seems to happen when it hasn't been updated for a while. It once happened when I was in the middle of a multi-day trip, heading to several UK places on business. It was a sign of how indispensible it had become that I immediately called Morpheous to see if they could direct me to somewhere I could update it. They were brilliant, and gave me directions to a local dealer, calling them to arrange for me to borrow their cradle to do an update. Sure enough, that cured it.