SkyTrak Horizontal Launch Angle / Side Degrees

[DannyMRICS]

I’ve been trying to achieve a slightly positive HLA, and looking through my history of hundreds of shots, I have only found two shots with a Side Degree of between 0.1 and 1.9. Dozens at 0.0 and 2.0, and any fraction above that, but virtually none between 0.1 and 1.9.

On the actual range I realise that it rounds off, and I get many shots at 0 and 2, but none at 1.

Anybody else seen the same?

Curious.

Dan.

[AndyF]

Hi Dan,
It may well be to do with the fact that the quoted accuracy of the Skytrak (as found on the Rapsodo website) is HLA to +/- 2 degrees therefore maybe they take a value of less than 2 degrees to read 'straight' or 0

Andy

[Clevited]

Nothing to brag about but I can get 5 to 12 hla! Wanna trade?

[DannyMRICS]

Andy, good spot, but accuracy is different to degrees of measurement. Skytrak’s own marketing material shows side angle measurements to one decimal point. Even with an accuracy of +- 2degrees, I’d expect say 6/10 to be within 1degree.

Clevited, yeah, I’m capable of big side degree numbers too! 🤔

Anyone else not able to record shots with a side angle of 0.1 - 1.9 degrees?

Dan

[AndyF]

I've just looked through my recent shot history and I've actually got quite a few showing within that range.

I've got a good number showing the 1.5, 1.6, 1.4 and 1.8 and then some showing 0.7, 0.6, 0.2 and even a 0.1

There are lots of big numbers too which I'm not disclosing lol

Andy

[Gresh12]

I just looked at mine and I have nothing between 0.1 and 1.8.

[simmb]

Is this the side degree angle column we are talking about here? Should I be worried about -1136.7?

[DannyMRICS]

I've got a good number showing the 1.5, 1.6, 1.4 and 1.8 and then some showing 0.7, 0.6, 0.2 and even a 0.1

I just looked at mine and I have nothing between 0.1 and 1.8.

Thanks guys. Weird. I wonder what’s going on here ....

Is this the side degree angle column we are talking about here? Should I be worried about -1136.7?

We are talking about side angle, but you can’t have an angle of 1136 degrees! That must be side spin; and yes - you should be worried 😉.

Anybody else getting side angles of 0.1-1.9 degrees?

Dan

[simmb]

Think I have picked out the sessions from the version where side spin and deg were switched by mistake.

[skytrakali]

There's definitely something odd happening here. Here's a scatter plot of side degree measurements of a random session of mine (actually hitting with a gap wedge). Essentially it's measuring +2.5, 0, -2.5 or -5 degrees as the side angle.


I find that most of my sessions have scatter plots that look like this.

[DannyMRICS]

Thanks Skytrakali.

If I knew how to do a scatter graph, that’s something like what mine would look like.

I wonder if Seth might chime in at some point.

[Clevited]

Hopefully they observed this in their ball speed testing. They were going to try all kind of HLAs to see how it effected bs accuracy.

[Gresh12]

I did a bit more digging.

My session on Sept 14 had HLA’s all through the spectrum. Lots around zero but plus or minus in the tenths of degrees.

I looked at roughly 500 shots from Sept 18 onwards over various sessions and I get some exactly zero HLA and then a void to +/- 1.7 (only one session had 1.7s and most were 1.8 or more offline but I just randomly sampled 5-10 sessions). I didn’t do any scatter plots but I don’t seem to have only certain values once I get past 1.8 it seems like it can be any value. I would also say I get more more exactly zero than I did when I could get small variances off it.

I cant recall what day I upgraded to 3.3.0 but the timing is around then so I’m wondering if something changed to make very low HLA show as zero then some bigger values as 1.8 and then measure as normal (or some weird bias introduced).

I’ve only looked on IPad app at this stage. I do have an old version of the software on my PC with the club data beta that I will try in the next few days to see what happens.

[tom22]

Hla’s is always going to be a problem because of the +/- 2degs means that Hla can be off by 4 degrees and be in skytrak tolerance. I use a laser to line up unit parallel to center line of of driving range, can hit center line get 0 degree one time next shot hit 2 to 3 inches to left of line, should be -2 degrees left. Will show +2 degrees to right. This is this way it is a lot of the time.

[AndyF]

Here is mine from a recent session with my 4 iron where you can see a number of them less than 1.8. Ignore the big numbers though... I was deliberately trying to hit them really far offline

Andy

[skytrakali]

Interesting. Not like my results. AndyF's results have a much bigger range and are much less concentrated around a few values. From my scatter plot above you'd think that it was measuring only in +/- 2.5 degree increments (with a bit of noise thrown in). I'll try to have a look at some other data - I have logged close to 6,000 shots in all.