On my way to work each day I drive by a radar maching that is attached to a sign warning drivers to slow down. When I get as close as a mile, my radar detector almost jumps off the windshield. I am concerned about the amount of radiation that I am being exposed to each day. Does anyone have any information about the amount of radiation those things put out?
IIRC, radar uses radio waves. If this is correct (which it may not be) it is harmless, as radio waves will pass right through you without ill effect.
…Unless of course it’s a microwave radar, in which case you are slowly being turned into a ready-to-eat Hot Pocket.
Some time back, there were a number of stories about a statistically unusual number of cases of testicular cancer among police officers. This was connected by the press to the practice leaving a “hot” radar gun sitting in one’s lap. I don’t know what the final verdict is on this story.
Strangely, nobody ever made the claim that doughnuts cause testicular cancer.
At high enough power levels, microwaves can also make you sterile (males anyway) and cause cataracts. I don’t have the power density required to cause that for common radar frequencies with me right now. There should be no danger from driving by a radar monitor site though.
However, if you are worried about this, I do offer a solution. Find yourself a good map, and get yourself to a place near the radar gun/camera that is off the highway. Dress up like a ninja, and take a nice high-powered rifle with you. Blast that f***ing thing to the hell from whence it spawned. Run like hell.
Remote radar detectors rate a close second to urinalysis in my book of indications that the free world is on its way to becoming a police state. I would take every opportunity to destroy these expensive items before they generate enough income to pay for themselves. I would, that is, if I drove.
So I check out a radar gun site.
SPEEDCHEK SPORTS RADAR GUN
That site says:
This site (The Electromagnetic Spectrum) says:
This seems to indicate that the radar gun from the above link is in fact emitting microwaves. Hmmm…? Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Driving by a radar gun once a day is probably no big deal. The catcher in a baseball game gets hit with that bad boy about 150 times a day 4 days a week.
I didn’t even think about the home plate umpire. He probably gets hit 300 times a day. I think the umpires rotate though, so the ump would only be behind the plate once every four games.
Lets set the record straight! First, what do you mean by “radiation”? Are you refering to the broadcast of a signal in the air, or the power density of that radio signal that would cause it to be ionising? Ionising radiation as in radioactive fallout is a dangerous thing, but the power from a radar gun is non ionising. What can happen is that at any radio frequency if the power density is great enough, it can cause tissue damage by way of thermal heating. ie: exciting the water molecules in your body tissue so that the friction causes them to heat up and warm you, or shrink the tissue as used in hospitals with diathermy machines and other devices. This same technology is also used at much higher power levels in MICROWAVE ovens to cook meat. The safety level of microwave power density on the human body is 10 milliwatts per centimeter squared of skin. The average radar gun puts out 50 to 100 milliwatts, so don’t park it near the family jewels in the “on position” because it can cause thermal (tissue) damage. After a few inches this power density falls off so your in the safe area. Driving by a radar gun is certainly well within the safety zone.
Maybe the SETI@home folks need to change frequency of their search to 10.525 GHz. That way we will know that the extraterrestrial life we might find manny light-years away has laws that they enforce.
Yes, some portions of the microwave spectrum can cause harm to living things… the way they do this is by causing good old fashioned heat. If you don’t feel any heat, you’re not in danger. If you do, move out of the microwave beam. It’s not any more dangerous than fire (Fire good! grunt)
For what it’s worth, too, not all microwaves have the heating effect. They probably use a different frequency for typical radar speed guns, although I don’t have the numbers to say for sure.
I specifically didn’t get into the the various frequencies of microwaves and their effects at resonance on the human anatomy but since Chronos brought the issue up, here it is.
All radio frequencies including all microwave frequencies can cause tissue damage by way of R.F. thermal induction (heating). If you feel the heat it’s to late, the damage has already been done, as your brain is the last part of the chain that gets the message. This is done by simply bombarding the area with enough R.F. energy. When they first invented microwave ovens this was done at 900 Mhz. The hospital diathermy devices operated at 27 Mhz, the citizens band radio frequency. Nowadays some of these medical devices operate at 900 Mhz, such as the special chair that you sit on. This chair radiates about 5 to 15 watts of power to help shrink the prostate gland. 15 minutes of sitting is about the right “cooking” time. Home and restaurant microwave ovens use 2450 Mhz in the hundreds of watts to cook. The rational for these frequencies is that they are close to what’s called the hydrogen line.
The hydrogen line is where the hydrogen molecule (H2O) is resonant at 1400 Mhz. This is where you can excite the hydrogen component of water with the least amount of energy.
Aha! you say, so why don’t they use this frequency for medical and cooking applications? Because this freq. is designated as a radio quite zone. It’s set aside for radio astronomers to listen in outer space for life forms. And life can’t begin without…H2O.
What’s the correlation between that and cell phones one may ask? Well cell phones operate at 800 and 1800 Mhz. That’s pretty close to 1400 Mhz. The human body is most resonant between 30 to 400 Mhz. your head is resonant at 300 Mhz. The higher you go in freq. the smaller of the components of your body become resonant. You can shake up your retinas at 10 Ghz pretty good too.