Skytrak Disappointment

[Fluffy]

I'm building a simulator in Virginia in a 20x25x8.75 (ft) basement room. I hung a 99" x 176" net and HQ2 screen (via angle iron) from Par2pro. The screen is great. I bought an optishot to play with while working on the room. The optishot was fun, but rarely read my woods correctly if at all. After reading lots of forum posts, I bought a Skytrak. My first week with it has been a huge disappointment.

I'm formerly a 3 handicap, play to 9 now because I don't get to practice much right now. I'm building the simulator to remedy this issue.

Skytrak setup was simple, I immediately configured it for network mode after charging it for the required 6 hours out of the box. The delay between hit and results can take up to 20 seconds at times but I really don't mind this. What I do mind is the inaccuracy. Its been awful.

I normally carry my driver 285, three wood 250, the 5 iron 195, 7 iron 170, 58 degree wedge 105 (yards). The sand wedge and 7 iron came out close but the distance are off badly for long irons and woods. For example my driver goes 250 total 3 wood 225, 5 iron 170 yard. These are total distances reported not carry! Carry numbers are even shorter. By setting elevation to 10000 ft, I got distances close to my numbers.

With the distances so wrong I started to question curvature. I can hit low cuts and hooks (to get out from under trees) and the results we not matching my expectations. But i realized I was indoors, I had no proof.

Friday i went to the range around 2 pm after playing in a scramble. I hit the ball well i the tournament, so i was eager to test the skytrak. I realize range balls are crap so let's focus on shot shape, not distance. I used woods only so as to never take a divot. I used the alignment dots to pick a target line. (By the way, my skytrak sets up about 10 degrees to the right for the dots to aim to the target. Anyone else notice this?) I hit a lot of shots the curvature was generally wrong. Eventually i recorded observations. Here they are. These are my observations while standing on the range. No quantitative measurements were made other than Skytrak. For this test, i aligned the Skytrak, then hit 5 shots, then moved over a foot, aligned the skytrack and hit 5 more shots. I let my shots go wild for varying shapes. My observation is listed, then the skytrak report. The skytrak was set to 80 deg, 70 humidity, 500 elevation:

I am a right handed golfer

Driver, alignment 1

Push fade 80 yards right
Straight 1 yard right

Push fade 80 yards right
Straight draw 31 left

Push draw 10 yrd left
Straight draw 36 yrd left

Pull fade 50 yrd right
Straight pull 17 yrd left

Push fade 20 yrd right
Straight draw 40 yrd left

Driver alignment 2

Push fade 40 yrd right
Straight 12 yrd left center spin

Push draw 20 yrd left
Pull draw 53 left 969 spin

Straigh 10 yard right
Pull draw 31 yrd left. 345 spin

Pull draw 40 yrd left
Pull draw 55 yrd left 1200 spin

Snap hook 80 yrd left
Push fade 42 yrd right 859 cut spin

[Hoosierdaddy]

Were the balls you were using yellow by chance? It has been posted that yellow balls don't work well. Range balls have lots of markings on them. Could that have had an effect on your test? Try it again with clean white balls and see if you get the same results.

[Fluffy]

The balls were white.

I wonder if the combination of +-2 deg horizontal angle and +- 250 for side spin is just too loose of a spec to be useful.

I'm going to a range with mats this week. I'll test it again, this time with irons too.

[Bubba22]

Make sure you are lined up to the target line and level. Try with the mat as grass will not be as accurate. Keep us posted.

[Three Putt Pars]

This is an interesting conversation because many users are finding spot on results and others seem to be off. It will be interesting to learn whether the the discrepancy is due to user error or machine error.

I do quite a bit of hitting in my indoor bay and I have always felt that the numbers reported by my Skytrak are a bit short. This weekend I had an opportunity to do a small bit of testing at a driving range hitting driver and using real balls. I was the only person hitting balls on the range so I had a friend go out and watch where my drives landed - not rolled to but where they landed. They had a handheld GPS on "distance measure mode" and zeroed from my tee area. Before starting we tested the GPS against 5 flags ranging from 100 yards to 300 yards that had been range found and the numbers were within 2 yards on each flag. So I felt the GPS was very accurate. After each shot they walked to where the ball landed and then texted me that carry number. I then compared that to the carry number on Skytrak. I went through great effort to have the Skytrak leveled and aimed properly. I hit about 5-6 each of two different kinds of golf balls: ProV1x and Chrome Soft. They were all new, clean, unmarked balls and on each shot I placed a logo towards the camera as suggested. I had the temperature, humidity, and elevation settings set to what match my geographical area. The lighting was great as it was a sunny day but we had some cloud cover so I could easily see the laser dot on the ground and the Skytrak picked up every hit.

Unfortunately I didn't have much time and so I wasn't able to hit more balls and wasn't able to write each number down so I don't have a shot by shot list of data. But of the roughly 10-12 balls I hit there weren't any that carried short of the 250 marker. The GPS numbers we reported for carry ranged from 255 to 270 and the corresponding Skytrak numbers for carry ranged from 235 to 250. The Skytrak was about 20 yards short of real life on every hit. The shot shape was nearly perfect, however. Among those 10-12 I hit a few draws, a few fades, and a few pretty straight. The Skytrak was dead on for the flight image! By no stretch of the imagination would I call this a perfectly scientific test, but what I can say is that for me in it confirmed my gut feeling that the flight is correct but the distances I see when hitting on Skytrak in my hitting bay (when set for my elevation etc) are short.

One thing I've found is that you can adjust the temperature, humidity, or elevation and then return to the range screen and then re-play the last shot to see how that change affects the numbers. The replay button is the small curved arrow at the top of the range screen. I found that if I adjust the elevation up a few thousand feet then re-played the shot the numbers were accurate.

So if my short, quasi-scientific study's findings are at all accurate then it begs the question: is the ball data incorrect or the flight model incorrect? My hunch would be that the flight model is correct since it is universal across all users and since so many people are having outstanding results. Maybe there are a few of us that just have defective lenses or something mechanical that isn't picking up the proper ball data? I've taken my unit into local stores and tried to compare to GC2 but as many users have reported you can't really get both units to pick up the same shot because the Skytrak blocks the GC2's camera. So I'm hoping to carve out some time on a local Trackman to do some further testing.

Until then I'm at least happy to report that the ball flight image displayed was very accurate to what I saw in real life.

[DeaconBlooze]

A lot of driving ranges have elevated tees. Was that the case with your testing?

[wbond]

Three Putt Pars do you happen to have the data still from your session. If so, can you plug them into flightoptimizer and see how the results compare there. If the shot shape is correct, then it would seem the spin measurement is correct, at least the side spin numbers anyway. I wonder if it's an issue with ball speed maybe.

[Three Putt Pars]

Good question on the elevated tees. This driving range had two sets of tees and we went to the lower one. If anything I'd say we were actually hitting a few yards uphill. In regards to the data, I don't have anything recorded. In hindsight I really wish that I'd have written down all of the ball data but we were just doing this out of curiosity. I wasn't really setting out to do a full test. My post probably doesn't belong in this thread because I'm really happy with my Skytrak - not at all disappointed. I've just always thought that my numbers were a little short and that's why I took it to the range this past weekend.

[SkyTrak_Seth]

I will say that we've had a number of complaints of SkyTrak misreading the balls in controlled environments. Early in the game, we thought it must have been hardware issues - so we simply swapped the units out. I had many of those shipped directly to me and we hit tested on them (actual and bench) and not one of them read anything out of the ordinary. Not saying it isn't possible, but I think I have yet to see a hardware failure regarding misreading. There are several instances even on this forum where people doubted the accuracy of the system, only to find out they were actually hitting the ball that way either on the course or on a Trackman/GC2.

Setup is key, and there is a difference between a fundamental misread in a controlled environment vs variables exceeding the system's capabilities. It sounds like your system was having trouble catching a mark on the ball outdoors mid-day, which is really the worst time to take it outside. When the sun is overhead, a lot of times it will wash out the dimples, so I always try to face a mark toward the camera. Other things like the white rubber tee, white shoes, or a white club head can factor into misreadings.

[Ronsc1985]

A couple of points.

Are you folks taking into account the wind when making outdoor comparisons? Wind is very hard to measure shot to shot since it usually is constantly changing direction and wind velocity varies a lot depending on how high off ground level the shot is. What you measure at ground level may not be what the ball sees.

Is there any way with Skytrak to see the images the cameras take. In the Vector Pro , which was from the same company and probably the same software physics and capture algorithms, if both images were not perfect you could see some really weird ball flight and spin results.

As a side note if you are using new, and not chewed up by the pickup and washing machines range balls, the distance they go particularly with a driver is minimally different from a new Prov1 etc. I have measured this several times indoors with my GC2 and honestly the difference in ball speed, launch angle and spin for a driver at swing speeds between 90 and 105 mph is not worth talking about. With higher lofted clubs you do see a difference in spin which is significant, like 1000 rpms on a 6500 rpm base.

[jon.summy@aol.com]

We just took our ST to the driving range to see what would happen if you hit a driver on the range. Our range does not have matts. We only tried about 5 shots and nothing even registered. I am positive it was the grass. Our ST never even registered a shot on white balls and teed up in the grass. I will try it again sometime when I can take a matt out. This is no big deal to us as when we always have gotten great results hitting off a matt which is what is required.

[Fluffy]

So here is my update:

I was disturbed by my initial assessment that the skytrak had to be aligned 10 deg open for the dots to be aimed at the target. So i setup the skytrak on a flat tabletop to assess the red dot alignment. I was wrong, my skytrak needs to be aligned very slightly closed to the target line. I then went to a nice range with matts. I hit thirty shorts with 7 iron, 5 iron, 3 wood. I hit punch shots with banana curves both cuts and hooks. This time only had 4 shots incorrect curvature. I was pretty impressed. The driver didn't fair so well till I elevated the skytrack so the laser beam hit the top of the tee (these mats use traditional wood tees). It did much better then. The distances were still short, but curvature and horizontal spin was good, and that is all i care about (until TGC is released!).

I guess i'll build a stand for the skytrak with a step and levels built in, since this is what must of been wrong during my original outdoor test (it was an overcast day).

A moderator is welcome to change the thread title to "skytrak is very sensitive to setup, but does give good numbers".

[Bubba22]

Glad to hear this Fluffy. Thanks for the update. Setup is truly the key. Hope to play online with you once you get TGC.

[foggedz]

What type of ball are you using? I dont know if anyone else sees the same thing I do, but I think that the Skytack takes off too much distance for added spin. For example Im a 2-3 hdcp, and hit a stock 75% swing 8 iron 160 yards on the coarse with a PROV1X ball.

I usually practice indoors with my Skytrack and I dont usually use a PROV1X, but rather a mid quality $25-$30 a dzn type ball. With a 8 iron I usually see 111-113mph ball speeds with 5000 give or take RPM's. This is usually good for a ball that flys 155-160 with 5-10 yards of roll out.

If I use a PROV1X with Skytrack my ball speeds will be close to the same at 110-111mph but the RPM's will go up to 8000 give or take. With this RPM the flight of the ball on Skyrack looks completly different. The ball just climbs and climbs then falls out of the air. I will have trouble getting much more than 140 cards of carry, and the ball has little or no roll out.

Swap in my usual balls, and the distance comes right back. Granted the PROV will spin more and stop faster, but I know for a fact that in the real world a high quality ball is not 25 yards shorter than a mid quality ball with well struck shots.

[Wev]

Cheap ball = hard ball = less spin = lower launch = goes further. You've also got spin loft to account for etc. 5000 rpm for an 8 iron is too low, which is giving you artificial long distance and probably too much roll (which isn't any good for hitting greens).

Also your "75%" swing 8I is probably carrying 140 on the course and rolling 20 yards on the greens when you hit them, nobody wants that.