Not sure if it's national or local.
MONDAY 26 FEBRUARY
Current affairs
Speed Guns Misfiring: Tonight
8:00pm - 8:30pm
ITV1 Yorkshire
VIDEO Plus+: 5084
Subtitles, widescreen
Could a speed gun widely used by police really be seriously flawed? Mark Jordan meets the motorist who claims he can prove the device is error prone, and others who have challenged its readings through the courts with increasing success.
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Probably builds on the Daily Mail investigation into some of these speed guns' anomomlies sometime last year.
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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Some examples:
www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/southwest/series7/speed-ca...l
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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By the way it's also listed for the Granada area so presumably must be being shown on the full ITV network.
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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Speed Guns Misfiring: Tonight
ITV Anglia Mon Feb 26 8:00 PM
1 (30 min., Subtitledin English, United Kingdom, Education/Science/Factual Topics)
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Could a speed gun widely used by police really be seriously flawed? Mark Jordan meets the motorist who claims he can prove the device is error prone, and others who have challenged its readings through the courts with increasing success.
May be worth watching - my guess it'll be about the 20/20 Ultralyte. One a cas eonce with one of these.
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I think tonight's programme is about the fat boy!
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Looks like it's been shifted back a week.
MONDAY 05 MARCH
Current affairs
Speed Guns Misfiring: Tonight
8:00pm - 8:30pm
ITV1 Yorkshire
VIDEO Plus+: 5740
Subtitles, widescreen
Could a speed gun widely used by police really be seriously flawed? Mark Jordan meets the motorist who claims he can prove the device is error prone, and others who have challenged its readings through the courts with increasing success.
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Advertised again in the tv listings but replaced by another programme - is this a cover up??!!
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Must be a conspiracy.
They said at the end of the program (I recorded it) that the speed camera episode was to be on Friday.
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It may be some legal thing. I won a case against this particular device. Mind you I also had hours of fun playing with an example that we borrowed.
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'Tis on Friday. I think it's more like a fill-in program that keeps getting put back when "real news storys" come along.
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"I also had hours of fun playing with an example that we borrowed"
Were you able to show the court that the wall was travelling at 20mph? I thought these things were very difficult to borrow?
WRT the programme, it now appears to have been shifted/rescheduled twice. Do I smell a rat..?
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I won a case against this particular device
Sounds like you should have represented the guy, mentioned in the prog - getting stuffed with £9k costs couldn't have been a very rewarding experience!!
VB
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Well after the programme was screened last night I would have expected some murmurings in the Backroom. Was everyone having some beer or was it that some of the arguments were a bit limp and not worthy of debate??? ( Throw grenade and retreat!!!!)
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Fullchat
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I thought comments from the manufacturer that the guy using it wasn't trained so was bound to get errors was a bit holier than thou. If he can make errors like this why can't any human being - trained or not? When the machine is on a tripod and pointing at a stationery car to get a reading of anything other than '0' suggest a problem.
Could a World rifle shooting champion hit a car number plate at 1,000 yards when the target is moving? This is what a 'trained' police officer is supposed to do to ensure accuracy.
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The programme made a big issue of the distance its used at and the potential for error readings from other vehicles. 1000 yards, which is just under 1/3 of a mile. You can hardly see a car at that distance never mind use a laser device to measure its speed. In reality the device is used at much less distance AND is corrobration for a visual estimate of excess speed.
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Fullchat
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The alignment of the sight and the beam becomes more critical as the distances increase. I was very concerned that one officer and possibly force admitted to never having calibrated this. Looking at one, the users sight seems a little vulnerable to knocks being sat on the top. I would be happier if the sighting optics and IR optics shared the same lens system - a bit like an SLR camera.
Everyone repeating the mantra of the infallibility of the things is also a little worrying to me, with it having been proved at least once in court that they are not infallible. I understand that the maker (or importer) has admitted that they are not 100% and have never been type approval tested on motorcycles.
Martin
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1,000 yds is 0.56 of a mile
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There are some things about it that are not clear to me and an explanation would have helped. Or did I miss something by being a few seconds late?
The equipment has two lenses/telescopes. One, I assume, is used to project the beam onto the vehicle and the other is there to look at the vehicle. Also, somewhere on the equipment there is detection of the reflected pulse, so that pulse travel time and hence distance can be processed to get speed. Speed is just rate of change of distance times some proportionality factor.
If the red blob we saw was the beam hitting the target, why is it so important that the equipment is aligned, other than to ensure you can see what the beam is hitting, through the viewing telescope? I assume if the spot is not conveniently near the center of the viewing 'scope you can adjust a screw to make it so?
Vehicle surfaces will vary in their reflectivity and so, with too much beam spread, it is possible to get a speed reading from a faster vehicle to the right or left, rather than the target one. Especially with a bit of hand jitter and only 0.3 seconds to make the measurement. Also, it is in principle possible to have a situation where the beam bounces off the front of an approaching vehicle and on to one nearer the equipment that is going the other way, and then back again, such that the speed reading is the sum of the two speeds. Any incidences of this in practice?
The processing of the signals to allow the statement that they are verified electronically and so will be be correct, is some check to see the changes in distance are regular for each successive pulse. Thus you can smoothly sweep along a wall and also get a speed reading. It does nothing to verify it came from the correct vehicle.
I don't know what the error rate is and I have not handled one of these equipments. I do know in the early days of the hand held radars it was first thought that almost any johnny could go out and make speed measurements. Someone at the station would have been on an instruction session. Just how much he understood and was able to pass on is open to speculation. But the act did eventually get cleaned up and put on a better footing.
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There is ,of course, the question of knowing the device displays a correct speed. That can be termed calibration. Not that I would expect a user's adjustment on the device.
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The red blob isn't the laser beam - it is just in the viewfinder to indicate where the laser is supposed to be.
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Absolutely right! What was I thinking of? Anyway thats even further away.
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Fullchat
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1,000 yds is 0.56 of a mile
0.57 if you want to quote to 2 decimal places. ;-)
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L\'escargot.
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i find it a bit unnerving when a bloke jumps out from behind a tree with what looks like a firearm and points it at you, even more so especially whilst travelling through nottinghamshire!
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A guy called Robin Hood used to do something similar around there...
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