heya walt...cool idea!
As far as the LED type, I would suggest a colored LED such as red, green, or blue. Depending on if you're colorblind and what contrasts with the sunlight the best with your eyes. I suppose red is a good place to start. Obviously yellow or orange wont do so well here. Green and blue may be middle ground. Also, your bike's paint scheme could play a part here. Obviously, a red LED with a red painted background won't contrast very well. So on and so forth.
I'm thinking that a "superbright" LED might be a good place to start. I don't think a regular LED would work very well, unless you're constantly glancing at it, but problems arise from the lack of attention to the road :shock:
Regarding your remote LED statement. I might have a different definition of remote, so...what do you mean by remote? Is this a unit that is completely seperate from your detector, such as a transmitter and receiver? or is this a hardwire approach where the sound output of your detector lights an LED through a hardwire?
I'm assuming that your detector has a different tone based on the gauge of the "threat"? What I'm trying to get at is when you are being clocked, the detector would be going crazy? Conversely, when you aren't being clocked, but someone ahead of you is, the detector would be semi active etc etc? So when you speak of an LED array, I'm thinking that you want to light 1 led for a minor threat, on up to lighting all LED's for an extreme threat? We could use a simple Vu meter circuit to do this, LM3915. This circuit would be similar to the bar graph display on amplifiers, stereos, etc.
If the detector isn't tone based, but rather tone rate based (beeps once for minor threat, beeps many times for an immediate threat etc), things may get a little tricky using an array scale as mentioned in the above paragraph.
I know this isn't much help, but knowing this stuff will help us to figure out what exactly you're trying to do, and thus, give you a good start. Have a good one!