Feedback for Ernest Sports Tour Plus

[PhatJohnny]

I have owned the Ernest Sports Tour Plus for approximately 3 months. Here is some feedback that I did not fully understand prior to purchasing:

1. You will need to hand place your ball in exactly the correct location (approximately 12 inches in front, 1 inch to the right of the simulator) for 100% of the shots that you hit.
2. The only ball that I can get to work is a Titleist, I have tried Bridgestone and I can not get the simulator to pick that ball up. You actually have to have the Titleist verbiage lined up parallel to the ground and facing the simulator.
3. If you hit the ball fat at all, the shot will not get picked up by the simulator.
4. You actually do need to tell the simulator what club you are using. If you forget to change the club after the previous shot, it will make a difference in the stats that are presented.
5. Customer service is weak. You can not order online and that applies to the simulator as well as E6 Connect and TGC2019 software. You must call Ernest Sports directly and you will get your order completed when they get around to it.

John S
Aurora, CO

[Chuck]

Just my observations as I've played with this ES16 Tour Plus unit. 1st, it plays better with TGC2019* than E6 Connect (subjective opinion). Find the center of your screen and find a line 8-10ft from the screen to tee off from. Place your unit 7" from the centerline at the tee location parallel to the centerline. With the latest firmware update, you may want to move the unit a 1/2" down towards the screen on the 7" parallel. I made some earlier posts about ball placement that have since been nullified by the firmware updates to the unit.

For putting, it's all-optical and only measures from the tee to about 2 feet out. Make sure that those two feet are absolutely level and plane. If you do that, putting can be very realistic with the ES16. I had to level mine with cardboard shims, but it makes a huge difference. Just to note; putting with E6 vs TGC is completely different, and I give the edge towards realism to TGC.

Get a good thick mat (like it 'holds a tee'). The Elite mats (or similar) make the gameplay so much more realistic.

The gotcha with ES16 Tour Plus is that it uses an audio trigger. Yeap, it uses a very sensitive microphone to hear the club strike the ball. It has some adaptive noise filtering but it still comes down to the sound. What happens after the trigger is, an infrared strobe gets triggered and for a short flight, the ball flight is captured. Radar tracks (as best as I can tell) incoming clubhead speed and swing-path and outgoing ball speed and direction. Ball spin is tracked optically. The biggest annoyance is the audio trigger sets everything in motion. It's a very short period, but if one hits the ball even slightly in front of the ball (hits it fat) it triggers the IR strobe and cameras so quickly it will not see the ball launch. End result is a missed swing read. So unlike real-world golf where a fat shot may carry 75ft off of a drive for a big fat muff, ES will simply NOT record it.

The second gotcha is when it doesn't get a good radar read. These are not obvious in TGC2019, but in E6 they are very obvious and affect the ball path at times. The quad radars read clubhead speed and swing path. I think it also reads clubhead face angle but I'll ask ES to clarify that. Anyway in E6, if there is a miss read in the radar that does-not-compute with the optical flight it will zero out club data like face angle and club path. It usually results in an artificially straight flight path as the optical side-spin appears to be a multiplier in the left-right path calculation (and 0 times anything = 0). In that case (for E6) that gives you a distance only shot right at the aiming stick. I've not seen this effect in TGC.

For me the challenging clubs are 3wood, 5wood, hybrid off-the-deck, Then the 60 wedge flop is hard to get the ES16 TP to read it. The latter will audio trigger before the ball is hit from the club bounce, and with the woods, it's simply hard to swing without a brushing of turf a little.

What you do get when you make that perfect swing using the ES16 TP in E6 is a very reliable, accurate, and believable multi-parameter measurement of the swing. For my teed-up driver or off-the-deck hybrids, irons-PW it all seems subjectively spot-on. TGC 2019 is similar. Ironically I like TGC2019 for putting as it seems way more realistic in the touch needed to putt. A 50ft putt on E6 is like putting with a sledgehammer (likely a software bug I suspect).

Overall, it's a good unit with a learning curve.

Look me up as Tour player 'CB' on TGC2019, E6, or Discord.

[Chuck]

Just to add a tip on TGC2019 putting, it is more challenging than real putting because you have to read simulated greens. It still putts the same but it can have a faster rollout than you might expect. It really is a function of how they compute the friction on the ball. It's a fun challenge.

[PhatJohnny]

Chuck,

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated.

I have been utilizing my ES Tour Plus quite a bit lately, and I have really come to love it. After reading the comments from Chuck, the adjustments that I made were minimal, and the number of misreads are now minimal as well. In fact, I may get zero misreads. I think my biggest problem now is that I get moving too quickly and I don't wait the half second for the light to turn green and that is where my misreads come from.

One last comment from my original post. Item 5 is not accurate. I have worked with ES customer support and I do feel that they are very responsive and helpful. I don't see a way to edit my original post or I would modify or delete that comment.

John