Sports & Recreation

Common Errors with Police Radar Guns

A lot of people are curious about police radar guns. They want to know if they are really accurate.  Here is some information about radar guns that the police use that you might find useful.

Even though most of these guns operate accurately and effectively, there’s a few situations when errors in the radar can happen. An error that could happen is called a Cosine Effect. This is an amount of error that results from that angle where the radar’s hitting the vehicle. An example’s when the car’s moving directly toward that radar with an angle that’s 0 degrees.  There’s no Cosine Effect. When there’s a greater angle, there’s a bigger error that’s caused by it. But even this can be accounted for and adjusted.

Some other errors which guns can make consist of a shadowing error. This happens when a radar gun’s moving and it’s picking up a vehicle’s speed that’s going slower than the police car.  It’s mistaking the speed of the other car for the ground speed. This causes the oncoming traffic as being measured fast inaccurately.  There’s something else called a ghosting error. This happens when a portion of the beam picks up some motion from another item. Scanning errors happen when the gun’s moving and it’s picking up the signals wrong.  Panning errors happen when the gun is moving and it’s too close to a processing unit, and that causes interference.