Marketing image from Pocket Radar
The Pocket Radar is a small cell phone sized radar gun that easily fits in your pocket. It is able to measure the speed of objects moving between 7 and 375 miles per hour. Useful for sports training, tuning RC vehicles, and pranking your friends with K-band radar detectors. Pocket Radar bounces a radio signal off an object and measures the Doppler shift on any waves that are reflected back. Power is provided by two AA batteries for 10,000 measurements. At $200 it is an expensive toy, but the build quality and accuracy seem to be very good.
I received a loaner to review yesterday and have already tested it out on a few things. It detected the blades on my ceiling fan as moving at 18 mph. One of my faster robots was clocked at 8mph, and a cheap RC car managed 14. The dog could hit 20 mph pretty easily when fetching a ball with the kids running at about half that speed.
On the highway it became evident that it is only measuring differential speed. Oncoming cars often read nearly 2x my speed and trees on the side of the road were much less than mine. Later I stood in my driveway and picked off cars driving by. Most of them were a nice and safe 15-20 mph, but a few were going much faster than that. Two of the cars slammed on the brakes when I clocked them. My own radar detector alerted me that there was a K-Band signal nearby.
I’m going to take it out this weekend and test more things, including the muzzle velocity of our t-shirt cannon, more cars, try some matchbox cars and more.
Available for $200 at:
Pocket Radar at Amazon
Pocket Radar.com
