Do radar or laser guns work in the rain?

 

i would think so..if it works in subs under water...i dont see why it wouldnt work in a rain..

 

Radio waves don't work well in water, Sound (sonar) does. But I can't seem to find a straight answer on the rain thing Of course, it's in the police's best interest to let you think that it does

 

I'll bet Dusty can answer my questions. Subs use sonar, not radar.

 

Lasers do not.. laser is very precise line of sight. The laser would refract off rain drops causing a scatter of the laser. Thats how they get the laser jammers to work. The laser is refracted back to the source instead of a single beam.

 

there might be some useful info http://autopedia.com/html/Radar.html

I would think Radar would work in the rain... look at airports, military, etc... just my guess...

 

Just found this....

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasc...9/phy99484.htm

Question - Are police radar detectors affected by dense fog and or
rain? How and what are the affects.
------------------------------------------------
Dear Rocket-

Your question about police radars and how weather affects them is a good
one. Weather has almost no effect on the operation of those radars.

What a radar "sees" depends on the character of the radar beam. In general,
the higher the frequency of the radar beam, the smaller the particles it can
detect. Radars designed to detect moving vehicles use frequencies that are
not reflected by small moisture droplets such as fog and clouds, or even
precipitation.

Very heavy rain can reduce the range of all radars, (an effect called
"attenuation"), due to the signal being absorbed by the precipitation. In
this case, weather conditions usually cause motorists to slow down to well
below the speed limit anyway.

Wendell Bechtold, Meteorologist
Forecaster, National Weather Service
Weather Forecast Office, St. Louis, MO

 

Yup. The only problem with rain is that some PDs have restrictions on high speed chases when the roads are wet.....ditto for fog.

 

those things will work in just about any conditions. it was raining last time i was hit by one. i had just installed one of the new jammers and it worked , thank goodness. i have some info on the radar guns in the new products section, just scroll down to the middle for it.

 

Good stuff John, thanks for the info!

For those you out there that aren't regular users of radar/laser devices, lasers are the latest step in technology for the law enforcement community. However, they DO have limits....first of all, they cost about three times as much as a good Ka band unit...bad news for small to medium sized PDs. Second, motorcycles are very difficult to read until they are almost on top of the laser unit. Laser units I've seen cannot be handheld like radar units.

Roughly 10% of LE agencies use laser, most of these being state agencies. The Ka band unit is still the most popular among "city" cops. A major reason is the "instant on" feature called "RF Hold" that takes a reading of a vehicle's speed within a second, making radar detectors useless UNLESS there is traffic in the area and the officer is taking readings on other vehicles (He/she must first visually estimate a vehicles speed before using radar according to most laws) A driver might then get a reflected signal from the other vehicle being "clocked" depending on the radar detector, landscape, range, etc.

Ka band operates bewtween 34.200 and 35.200 GHz.