How Laser Radar Guns Work

How Laser Radar Guns Work

How Laser Radar Guns Work

The newest trend with radar detectors is devices that generate laser lights using a semiconductor. This new technology far surpasses the older radar detectors that use radio signals to detect police.

Laser (lidar, for light detection and ranging) speed guns use a more direct method that relies on the reflection time of light. For example, if you shout down a well or across a canyon, the sound takes a noticeable amount of time to reach the bottom of the well and travel back to your ear. Sound travels at about 1,000 feet per second, so a deep well or a wide canyon creates a very apparent round-trip time for the sound. A laser speed gun measures the round-trip time for light to reach a car and reflect back. Light from a laser spped gun moves a lot faster than sound. About 984,000,000 feet per second, or 1 foot per nanosecond. A laser speed gun shoots a very short burst of infrared laser light and then waits for it to reflect off the vehicle.

The gun counts the number of nanoseconds it takes for the round-trip, and by dividing by 2 it can calculate the distance to the car. If the gun takes 1,000 samples per second, it can compare the change in distance between samples and calculate the speed of the car. By taking several hundred samples over the course of a third of a second or so, the accuracy can be very high.

Laser detectors offer a faster lock-on time, which averages around one-third of a second. The laser beams are confined to a limited spread, around six feet for about 2,000 feet of space. This allows the beams to be recognized more quickly, giving the driver more advanced notice.

If you could color a radar beam the color of a red cloud, the radar beam expands outward very quickly, such that at 300 feet a radar beam may be 300 feet wide and 75 feet tall, contrasting a laser beam to a radar signal, the laser beam is just 12' to 15' wide in distances of 400 to 600 feet.

The advantage of a laser speed gun is that the size of the "cone" of light that the gun emits is very small, even at a range like 1,000 feet. The cone at this distance might be 3 feet in diameter. This allows the gun to target a specific vehicle. A laser speed gun is very accurate. The disadvantage is that the officer has to aim a laser speed gun while normal police rader with a broad radar beam can detect without aiming.

How Laser Radar Guns Work

By: Antoinette Franklin

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