Originally Posted by
Leisesturm
I will eat a delicate bodypart raw and without hot sauce if it is proven that the first poster to mention strobes was not referring to the common bicycle flasher (Strobus rectificus) by its Latin binomial. No commonly available cycling head or tail lights 'strobe', they 'flash', and they flash at rates accepted by medical experts to be minimally affecting of epileptic individuals. Get over it. Epilepsy as a reason for not flashing is a ship that has sailed. Your ticket is non-refundable. May as well use the thing. It may even save your life someday. But probably not. Wanna know what is even better for safety than decking yourself out like a First Responder? Spatial Awareness. I know you've heard of it. It's a thing. And a useful thing at that.
Well, I am not that poster, and I do these days use a combination of blinking and steady LEDs on my bike both fore and aft, depending on the traffic and background lighting situation. My Niterider system allows for this, easily.
But for the sake of your first sentence... in the early '80s, at the height of all the really crappy incandescent lighting that was available for cyclists at the time, I did use, for a time, an actual strobe.
It was from a Navy MOB module, and I mounted the xenon flash tube on a short fiberglass rod, about 4 feet up from the rear rack of my bike. I rode some dark high speed roads, commuting late at night in those days... and really wanted to be seen.
I only did it for a while... the bright flash strobing on dark roads, while using a crappy headlight, was just too eerie for me to take.
I tried a lot of different "see me" schemes back in those days... finally settling on three Belt Beacons, arranged in a triangle, mounted on an aluminum plate, and wired together with one switch... this was mounted to the rails of my Brooks saddle, facing aft. For a headlight, I used a halogen lamp (high tech, at the time) wired to a Sanyo generator... which rode on the top of the rear tire, vice the sidewall. I had removed the Sanyo regulator circuit, and let the halogen have all the "juice" it wanted... which made it quite bright on downhill runs... which fortunately were short enough to not burn out the bulb. (I think the whole arrangement was somewhat mechanically self limiting, due to the friction of the generator... and my desire to not out ride my light.)
I used that for about 5 years or so... until a recharchable system, and eventually, Niterider came along.
But indeed, at one point, I did have a strobe.