At 1:12 PM -0600 1/16/00, David E. Ingold wrote:
They need the most perpendicular
surface they can find on your car to get a good reading. That is why they
mostly use the front license plate. It is fairly perpendicular to the ray,
and it is highly reflective. Take your front plate bracket and bend it down
about 20-30 deg. You'll still be legal for having a front plate, and then
they have to find something else.
That is true, but only applies for 'normal' license plates.
Many states have painted plates which, like most surfaces, relfect a
mix of diffusely and specularly reflected light. The CA plates are
retro-reflective, like street signs, bicycle reflectors. . . This
means that an incident light ray is reflected back on itself, not
obeying the law of reflection. Well, actually it does obey the law of
reflection, just on a smaller scale: the surface is coated with a
material which contains micro-corner-cube-reflectors. A corner cube
reflector is just a reflective material shaped like the inside corner
of a cube (you'll often see large (6"+) Aluminum reflectors hanging
from the masts of sailboats, so they show up better to radar, these
are just large corner-cubes) If you examine the geometry, and use the
law of reflection, you'll see that any light ray which strikes such a
structure will bounce three times and go back exactly where it came
from. So any license plated with a retro- relfective coating is a
GREAT target for laser.
However, the question is pretty much moot, since any A2
headlight will return enough signal to be detected.
The plus about laser is, they really don't work well past 200 yards, much
worse than Radar. Much final readings you find in court are well under 100
yards.
Maybe I don't know the range for sure, but any limited range
is mitigated by the fact that since there is much less stray
radiation, as compared to radar, you detector doesn't pick it up
until you're much closer, usually when it's aimed at you. They are
very effective.
Lee
W. Lee Hendrick
[email protected]
http://soliton.ucsd.edu/~hendrick/
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