The pocket radar It is a small radar gun the size of a mobile phone that easily fits in your pocket. It is capable of measuring the speed of objects moving between 7 and 600 kilometers 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 in any waves that are reflected. Power is provided by two AA batteries for 10,000 measurements. At $200 it’s an expensive toy, but the build quality and accuracy seem to be very good.
I received a loan to review it yesterday and have already tested it on a few things. It detected my ceiling fan blades moving at 18 mph. One of my fastest robots reached 8 mph and a cheap RC car reached 14. The dog could reach 20 mph fairly easily when fetching a ball while the kids ran at about half that speed.
On the road it became evident that it only measures differential speed. Cars coming from the opposite direction often clocked almost twice my speed and the trees on the side of the road were much fewer than mine. Later I stood in the driveway and picked out the cars passing by. Most of them were going a nice, safe speed of 15 to 20 mph, but some were going much faster than that. Two of the cars braked sharply when I timed them. My own radar detector alerted me that there was a K-Band signal nearby.
I’m taking it out this weekend and testing more things including our t-shirt cannon muzzle velocity, more cars, testing some matchbox cars, and more.
Available for $200 at:
Pocket Radar on Amazon
PocketRadar.com