• DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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    9 months ago

    They don’t really work.

    Is the whistle louder than the sound of your vehicle and the road?
    Is that sound going to reach the deer before it’s too late? What about when the wind is blowing in the other direction?

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228505867_Analysis_and_effectiveness_of_deer_whistles_for_motor_vehicles_Frequencies_levels_and_animal_threshold_responses

    One of the predominant frequencies of the whistles, 12 kHz is clearly outside the best frequency of hearing of the deer. The average sound pressure level at 3.3 kHz was determined to be around 70 dB re 20 uPa when the device was bumper-mounted at 40 mph and was totally lost to the road noise produced by the car since it falls within the range of car noise

      • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        Driving on the highway, at speed, will put out at least 75 dBs.

        80 is generally the line drawn when you’re causing hearing damage in humans. If you’re blasting out the sound to go over the sound of the vehicle, you are causing other issues.

        Edit:

        I probably should’ve re-linked the article I posted earlier in the branch, and thrown in a quote with one of the example findings:

        This would require signal strength of greater than 289 dB just for the animal to hear the sound.

          • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.ca
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            9 months ago

            That is true, but the speakers would probably need to be much louder than 80dB. The loudness required changes on a few factors, just I threw out one of the many ways that driving is awful for everyone around the car.

            I probably should’ve re-linked the article I posted earlier in the branch, and thrown in a quote with one of the example findings:

            This would require signal strength of greater than 289 dB just for the animal to hear the sound.