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Comment by bbbbb5 | Hacker News Reader

These are absolutely game-changing while driving, makes spotting cop cars a breeze.

Reminds me of the war stories Arne Toman tells about his Cannonball Runs[0] from NYC to LA. Apparently, the front-seat passenger ("spotter") is constantly (for hours!) on the lookout for cops using binoculars.

Toman is this guy:

> In May 2020, Arne Toman, Doug Tabbutt, and spotter Dunadel Daryoush set the new cannonball record of 25 hours and 39 minutes in a modified 2016 Audi S6 disguised to look like a Ford Taurus police interceptor. Police-evasion modifications included brake light kill-switches, radar detectors, laser diffusers, CB-radio, and a roof-mounted thermal camera. Performance modifications included a trunk-mounted 67-gallon auxiliary fuel cell sourced from the car used in Toman and Tabbutt's 2019 cannonball run, modified turbochargers, an upgraded heat-exchanger, and custom ECU tuning that allowed for engine-mapping to be changed on-demand to suit either 91 or 93-octane fuel; allowing the car to generate an estimated 600 horsepower. The run achieved an overall average speed of 110 miles per hour (180 km/h) for the entire run, with average speeds upwards of 125 miles per hour (201 km/h) across some states, and which at no time exceeded 175 miles per hour (282 km/h).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannonball_Run_challenge

These people are risking other people‘s lives for their stupid rich-people hobbies. It’s disgusting, really.

I think you might be severely overestimating the risk, people doing these runs obviously do everything in their power to spend as much time on empty roads as possible.

I am a bit torn. I attended a talk by Toman and he mentioned that, apart from having a spotter on the passenger seat, they have many spotters along the entire way and also use drones and thermal cameras to spot cars, so they always know ahead of time what's coming. In particular, he said that they slow down to legal speeds whenever they get near another car.

Given all that, I don't think the risk is that crazy high anymore but I do see where you're coming from.

It’s probably safe if they are just going fast in areas where they know it’s empty.

But telling the story provides cover for 19-year old kids trying to impress their friends who definitely do not have an advance drone checking for other cars.

As long as 30,000+ people die on our roads every year…my patience for these antics is very limited.

People like this will exist regardless of how much patience we have for them. Personally I prefer them to have a less harmful outlet for their antics than trying to organize a revolution or stage a coup. Look where it got the Soviets.

I would gladly be mown down by a vehicle traveling at 175mph if it minimised the threat of a communist revolution.

45,000+ in 2021, highest in many years

The covid canonballers also had volunteers tie up the cops by intentionally breaking the law at speed traps ahead of the arriving racer. Not something to be proud of.

It'd be easier to see this as strictly bad if speed traps were usually motivated by road safety, not revenue collection or discovering secondary crimes.

Are you speeding while looking out for cops through binoculars?

Obviously the binoculars are for the passenger, I don't think you'd be able to continue driving for very long otherwise.

This brings a whole new level to the looking at the road in the distance ahead of you rather than right in front of the bumper.

Wow, it lets you see behind trees and street corners? The device is practically paying for itself at that point!

No, unfortunately not. For that I just use an USRP to alert on nearby TETRA handsets, not super reliable though.

There are UK companies with a similar commercial products https://www.targetblueye.co.uk https://www.pythondetectors.com

Woah, didn't know these existed. Thanks!

This has been a really fun project to work on during the weekends, definitely recommend it. Next step for me will be to get automatic direction finding working, hopefully will finish that during the next year.

Are you using multiple phase matched receivers? I've wanted to try that on P.25 radios here in the US but never gotten the hardware, time, and motivation together. :)

I'm way out of my depth with the ADF. A friend gave me an old rotating marine ADF receiver I've been playing with, but as it turns out I'm not gonna get that spinning fast enough for my purposes.

I've got the mathematics background to eventually get this working, but not the radio background to do so very quickly.

Besides driving too fast, a good pair of binoculars really comes in handy for a wide variety of antisocial activities.

I usually don't have binoculars up to my face while driving. It interferes with the peripheral vision.

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