Pocket Radar at USPTA Conference. Annual Tennis Event.
On the week of Sept. 16-21, members of the United States Professional Tennis Association gathered in beautiful Monterey, California for what is the annual USPTA World Conference. First time host division Northern California, where our headquarters are located, was a great place for USPTA to celebrate its 85th birthday, and the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel & Spa was the perfect setting. Tennis is one of the largest sports in the world, and it is hugely popular in the state of California.
Pocket Radar was fortunate to be a part of the conference, and take part in the trade show on the night of Wednesday the 19th. The ability to showcase a product that is based around speed measurement and improved performance was exciting, and it was great to see the tennis community embrace the Pocket Radar. It was a pleasure to interact with members of the USPTA and get insight into the mindset of how tennis experts think. One of the key speakers of the event, Speaker Lisa Dodson, was of great help introducing top tennis professionals to our team.
The annual USPTA event was a huge success for everyone involved, including Pocket Radar, and the tennis community was very generous and informative in giving our team access to their knowledge of the sport. The study and practice of speed measurement is vastly growing in today’s age of sports and science, and tennis is a sport that is constantly adapting and adding new techniques to help with coaching and training. We look forward to partaking in the Conference in the upcoming years, and continuing a great relationship with the USPTA and the tennis community.
Pocket Radar Helps Take Team to the Little League World Series!
Tonight a team from Uganda plays for the first time ever in the Little League World Series. They have been training hard all season to make it this far. Pocket RadarTM has been a key part of their training to help develop the skills needed to compete at the top level in the world. Take a look at the pictures of them using the Pocket Radar on their home turf in Africa.
The Pocket Radar is changing the world of sports. It has been adopted as a key skill development tool at all levels of baseball. It is used for pitcher rehabilitation by Stan Conte at the LA Dodgers. It is the only radar gun used for bullpen work by Andy Lopez at the University of Arizona, this year’s College World Series Champions. It is also helping teams in Little League and other youth leagues develop their hitting, throwing and running skills.
We also want to congratulate our local Sonoma County team Petaluma National Little League for making it to the Little League World Series. We are very excited for them.
No matter who ends up winning we are proud to be a part of the process.
Congratulations to the Arizona Wildcats and Coach Andy Lopez
Congratulations to the Arizona Wildcats baseball team for winning the 2012 College World Series title. Coach Andy Lopez and the Wildcats were early adopters of the Pocket Radar and we are very excited for them.
The Wildcats clinched the title in a 4-1 win over South Carolina ending their streak of winning the past 2 national championships.
Coach Lopez set an all-time record for most years between national championships. He led Pepperdine to the same title in 1992. Arizona started the season ranked #5 and ended ranked #1 after winning the College World Series with a perfect record of 5-0.
When we asked Coach Lopez what he thought about the Pocket Radar he told us: “The Pocket Radar is so convenient, it’s the only radar that I use for my bullpen. At this price, I can have a radar gun wherever I need one.”
The Pocket Radar Team and SETI
The Pocket Radar team recently had the privilege of working with the SETI institute to help evaluate a possible new radio telescope site for scientific exploration. We were very excited to get a chance to work with Dr. Frank Drake, the father of SETI and author of the famous Drake Equation used to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
We spent the day at the Jamesburg Earth Station helping do an RF site survey to determine the suitability for possible deep space radio astronomy work. This facility went into service in 1969, just in time to carry the Moon landing live to the world. COMSAT owned and operated this 97 foot diameter, high-capacity earth station, and provided all forms of overseas communications via satellite between the U.S. and points all around the Pacific Rim. This antenna, taller than a 10-story building, is located in the Upper Carmel Valley. We got the complete tour, including the chance to climb up to the very top of the reflector.
We set up a low noise amplifier and spectrum analyzer with a broadband directional antenna and measured the radio frequency spectrum from 1 GHz to 10 GHz in a 360 degree sweep to see if the site was “quiet” enough for radio astronomy.
It was quite an honor to meet Dr. Drake and to contribute to this scientific endeavor, at least in some small way. It was a very fun excursion from our regular radar work. Who knows, maybe this will lead to some important discoveries sometime in the future.
Congratulations to the Arizona State University Sun Devils!
The Pocket Radar team would like to congratulate the Arizona State University Sun Devils softball team for winning the 2011 Women’s College World Series title. The Sun Devils clinched the title in a 7-2 win over the Florida Gators in Oklahoma City on June 7 to earn their second championship title in four years.
Coached by Clint Myers, Arizona State entered the series ranked #1 with a 60-6 overall record. While the Sun Devils trailed after the first inning, they were able to quickly recover, scoring three runs in the second inning and holding on to their lead for the remainder of the game. Coach Myers and the Sun Devils were early adopters of the Pocket Radar and we are very excited for them.
Want a Faster Tennis Serve? Do Sit-ups And Wrist Exercises!
We were recently paid a visit to the 2011 California Science Fair to meet with Kyle Lin, a Santa-Rosa High School student whose science fair project used Pocket Radar to study the effect that building rectus abdominis muscle strength or increasing wrist flexion has on tennis service velocity. Kyle used Pocket Radar to measure the serve velocity of each of the test groups over a 6-week period and documented his results. We had the chance to learn more about Kyle’s project and say congratulations on being selected as a 2011 California Science Fair exhibitor. Here is a video of Kyle telling us a little more about his project.
Radar History
“Welcome to Radar Nation, where the ideal velocities resemble temperatures in Phoenix in July.” In the April 4th edition of Sports Illustrated, writer Tom Verducci wrote a great article titled Radar Love; he included an overall history of how and where radar technology came about in the baseball industry. In 1946, at the Griffith Stadium in Washington, the Army tested a photo-electric cell to measure the speed of a fastball thrown by one of baseball’s greatest fastball pitchers Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians as it entered the unit which was placed on home plate; unlike today’s radar that clocks the ball at peak velocity, right after it has left the hand of the pitcher. Richard Goldstein of the New York Times wrote that Feller threw 30 pitches that day with an average of about 98.6 miles an hour. Prior to this, Feller measured his pitch speed against a speeding motorcycle cop, according to Carl Note from the San Francisco Chronicle. Feller would throw a pitch in a parking lot and as he threw, a motorcycle cop would race alongside the pitch to measure its speed.
It wasn’t until 1973, when “Michigan State coach Danny Litwhiler, a former major league outfielder,” used a car cigarette lighter outlet powered radar gun from the campus police cars to clock pitchers. He soon discovered that after recalibrating the gun to read small objects and asking the company to make a version that was battery powered, the device became a very useful management tool for coaches.
In 1975 the Orioles and the Dodgers became the first adopters of the radar gun as a training tool. In 1978, nine major league teams were using radar guns and by 1980 radar guns were being used by all major league scouts.
Pocket Radar – Year In Review
From claiming speed records in the air, on the ground or in the water, to fastballs, auto racing, and downhill skiing, to playground cycling and running races, there is no doubt that the “need for speed” is deeply rooted in humankind.
In fact, speed is such a fascination that an entire television network is devoted to covering all things “fast,” aptly named The Speed Channel.
While this innate desire to “Go Fast” has led to many great innovations over the past few decades, the tools used to measure speed have not benefitted nearly as much from the same innovation.
This is precisely why a few years ago, we set out to usher in a new era in speed radar technology with the invention of the world’s only palm-sized speed radar device. We named it Pocket Radar, and its small size, light weight and extremely accurate speed measurements are transforming the way in which players, coaches, fans and everyday consumers experience the action.
Nearly 16 months since the launch at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Pocket Radar continues to capture the attention of industry, media and consumers alike for its groundbreaking combination of sleek, compact, ultraportable design and break-through speed radar technology that provides users w