Safe Speed Forums

Strange that - many signs of SPECS( last month) - the odd SPEC here and there ,but not sufficient IMHO to do the job ( mind you ,I didn't try it on ) , but again ,when I went through , SPECS SET AT 20 would not be making much money.

_________________
lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

The sneaky one (Northbound) is that the last SPECS camera is a considerable distance AFTER the end of the roadworks. The road widens into three lanes just as you approach the Scottish border and everyone speeds up (as the cones end some distance prior to that!) but the NSL sign is just after the last camera. Only thing is, I've been watching it in the dark and it doesn't seem to have the same faint red glow through the lenses that the other ones do so I've an idea it's not on.

Ernest, do you have a copy of those pdfs?

_________________
"Safety" Scamera Partnerships;
Profitting from death and misery since 1993.

Believe nothing- Question everything.

Of course - who would trust those weaselly SCP staff to leave up their dodgy paperwork once they realised people might see through their smokescreen of supposed openness!
I shall PM a link where you can access my copies!

Here are the Ings pictures which Substandard said were taken on a day when the van was not there!

_________________
Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

No. it probably uses a different filter.
Some are filtered at 830nm and some at 940nm. The 940 is impossible to spot. I use an image intensifier to look at them. The reason the red glow is there is because the filter doesn't remove all the light...there is a region where the filter characteristics allow a small amount of visible red through. The ones using infrared leds (at 940) give no visible light at all.

Is that correct? Is it not a case of some using IR LEDs and others incandescent bulbs with an IR pass filter? The ones on the M3 use the latter (I took a photo with my IR enabled camera), the emitted light is quite obvious.

Ernest suggested driving past them with a video camera trained on them. Apparently the IR shows up really well!

The infrared shows up for several hundred metres from the units.
There are two on the A428 near Yardley Hastings (Northants). There is no visible red glow at all, yet with the image intensifier you can see a half mile up the road clearly with the emitted ir light.

Just a few [bad] pictures of specs with a fairly wide ir filter.
Soory about the quality, but cars kept driving past.
Number 1: specs at 400 metres.

[img=http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/4903/14012008200qd0.th.jpg]


Number 2: specs at 400 metres with the back lights of car going away from me, towards the specs.

[img=http://img104.imageshack.us/img104/4693/14012008199to8.th.jpg]

The specs ir emitters are at the top of the pictures. The thing has a very poor contrast ratio, plus the phosphor tends to be slow as well...so it blurs easily. I'm getting a digital system soon...
The area of the road that the emitters are focused onto is about 50-100 metres from the camera, but since these are also used for basic surveillance I thought that taking photos in front of them was not a good idea. Terrorism act etc...

I hope they don't wash-out my NVGs

Interesting! Presumably as SPECS cameras are "fixed", there is no legal problem wit husing a GPS-based detector for them (or, perhaps, any other sort of detector (like an IR one)?

Apparently last year police noticed a number of motorists exiting a SPECS site in Northants (I think) at high speed with apparent impunity.

It turned out there was a website which released some advice to drivers in the SPECS site, and gave details of a speed to slow down to for a given distance, which then allowed drivers to complete the remaining distance well above the posted limit.

Various local wiseguys were putting this to the test - hence the apparent high speed drivers.

Somebody must have heard Clarkson's (humerous) advice to enter the SPECs then pull over for a minute, then drive like the clappers, and had done the maths!!

_________________
Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

It looks like they're about to put the same white lines on the road at SPECS sites that they have at ordinary speed cam sites. At least, the ones on the a428 have lines made with spray cans at the moment...