My radar detector always goes off in work zones. This happens late at night when no one is working or around too. I can even predict the moment it will come on in certain work zones.
Is this some kind of trick they do to get you to slow down in work zones?
Here in Massachusetts, the portable programmable electronic signs that are often used near work zones have radar guns on them.
Not sure of what the purpose is.
The sign can be programmed to display your speed. This has a psychological effect of making speeding folks slow down, even though the sign isn’t used for law enforcement. I don’t know why the radar part would be left on all the time, even if the sign is saying something like “keep right”, but since radar isn’t exactly visible to the naked eye it might not be obvious to the guy who turned the sign on that the radar part is on too. In a rural area, the sign might also be programmed to turn off if no one is coming, so that it saves battery power. As soon as someone approaches, it starts flashing “keep right” or whatever it is programmed to say.
Radar based motion detectors will also often set off a radar detector. They might have motion detectors hooked to alarms near equipment to stop people from stealing it. Sometimes the motion detectors are connected to lights which come on when you approach something, which is designed to stop theft or keep you out of a dangerous place where you shouldn’t be.
Heh! Whenever I see one of those signs I start accelerating. Maybe if I go fast enough it will say “HIGH SCORE!!!” or something.
Yeah me too. if cops were around they would not need the signs. Lets me know it is safe to speed.
I remember when I had an old radar detector (probably ~1998) and even back then they were just starting some supposed network of alerts. I thought there were around 50 messages, many having to do with road work. So maybe your radar detector is picking up some of these alerts? Sometimes mine would even say “fog” (I think) or “caution” etc.
Along the PA turnpike, most of the portable signs have radar guns on the bottom edge. Now if I could just get people to stop stomping on the brakes after they’ve seen the trooper… :smack:
I know at least one guy who thought as you did, and one municipality which put a camera and a recorder on one, and a court hearing involving six seperate 100+ in a 45 citations. =P
I’ve noticed this, too, and my assumption was that the particular work zone I was near was broadcasting the Safety Warning System message appropriate for whatever they’re doing.
See, some radar detectors (although not mine) are capable of detecting these SWS messages and actually showing, on their little text displays, what hazard lies ahead. If, like me, your radar detector has a rather simpler display, you just get an alert as though the SWS message were a regular radar signal (they broadcast on the K band). Do a search for “SWS”, you’ll find out a lot more.
When I valet cars with detectors, they often go off while driving underneath the high output lights in the porte cochere, and also in the garage with the flourescent lamps.
The flourescents also make AM radios hum and buzz, too.
Perhaps flourescents emit frequencies around the X, K, and Ka bands?
When I worked for the highway department, I took a course in pavement marking where we had a lecture on work zone safety from a contractor who talked about using radar emitters in a work zone just to set off people’s radar detectors to get them to slow down. He said it wasn’t as effective as getting a police car to park there with its lights flashing, but it was better than nothing.
Another time when I was working on a pavement marking project where people were driving by extremely fast just a few feet away from us and we didn’t have access to anything like that, one of my co-workers went and stood upstream from us and pointed an infrared thermometer (which really didn’t look very much like a radar gun) at the oncoming cars and they slowed down drastically.
People who work on the road really want drivers to slow down and will do just about anything to get that to happen. I have ideas on why that is and what the highway department and contractors do wrong to cause it, but that’s another subject.