Skytrak Iron distances seem long

[Calo]

Hi all, I'm about 10 months into having a skytrak set up in my sim room. I was new to golf when I got it and spent last winter hacking around having fun with no real practice routine. I really started to focus on correcting my swing right as summer ended and the courses closed this year as I got sick of struggling with inconsistency and frustration on the course when playing with people who are better than me. I've been working on proper rotation, shallowing and a full shoulder turn from swaying and being too steep and no focus on proper shoulder turn. Here's my issue. All of this work was done on irons and not any woods in my sim room. (I'll move to those next) I went from 150 yards with my seven iron to 170 yards or longer carry and from 140 with my 8 iron to 160/65 yards carry and similar every club on down. My contact is dramatically better than it was as I'm more consistent and get that feel of a nice strike I rarely used to feel. I am now hitting irons on par or longer in some cases than my single digit handicap kids when they come home from college and so they are telling me there is no way the skytrak is accurate with my ball striking. My handicap would be greater than 20 if I kept one based on my play this past summer. I went to a professional simulator 'bar' last week with some friends and my now farther distances were the same there as with my skytrak. Courses are all closed here for the year so have not been able to take any of this new found distance to the course to see if any of it is real. It all feels a little bit unreasonable to be adding 20 yards on to most of my irons and feel like the skytrak and whatever overhead sim the golf place I went to be accurate. Not sure what to think here or what I can do to do any reasonableness testing on the Skytrak. I keep the skytrak at 1000 feet above sea level for all courses and the distances are the same if I use the Skytrak Range or the E6 range.
Anybody have any thoughts on how reasonable any of this is?

[wbond]

Well it comes down to BS, LA and Spin. Any idea what your BS and spin were before? What are you getting now for a 7 iron BS and spin. If the spin is way down, that will definitely add some yardage, but not that much. If you're turning properly now and have less of an arms only swing, that could definitely do it and so will a more consistent centered strike vs toe or heal.

[Calo]

I'll take a look and see what I can gather but my swing has fundamentally changed for the better.

[SkyTrak_Jordan]

I agree with wbond; look at the ball speed numbers and spin before and after to see if there are any major changes!

[fyton2v]

Same boat. A ton of hitting with the the SkyTrak and minor swing adjustments over several weeks. Irons starting showing me distances that were surprising. Went to go play real golf and those distances showed up there, too.

[CAPDAK]

You could go to your nearest golf galaxy or other such store and hit on their simulators. It’s not crazy to see those numbers from 7 or 8 irons of you are compressing the ball with forward shaft lean and good solid rotation and weight shift.

[Nugget]

I hit a 5 iron usually in the 170-175yd range but on occasion I get over 190-195, with a good burst of energy and a really clean hit. Nothing is impossible with increased swing speeds. Look and Dechambeau, I think he has hit a pitching wedge over 190yds. I watch his youtube channel occasionally. Keep up the practice, as I hope to as well through the winter. My biggest issue is still driver. lol

[Calo]

You could go to your nearest golf galaxy or other such store and hit on their simulators. It’s not crazy to see those numbers from 7 or 8 irons of you are compressing the ball with forward shaft lean and good solid rotation and weight shift.

I just went to a sim bar with an overhead system and a wrap around screen and played with some friends and my distances were quite a bit longer as i've improved my swing. All of those friends noted the extra distance as well as I outhit them by a wide margin. Those iron distances were decent but not quite skytrak distances. I was hitting 180 7 irons at the overhead place. For example then, I hit a 205 yard 7 iron yesterday on the ST with roll out and consistently hit in the 190's with 7 and 170's-180's with an 8. The odd thing is that i'm a terrible driver and it picks up my driver distances perfectly. The Skytrak is totally wrong with the swing speeds however as you are lucky to break 70mph with an iron. Basically, my most flush ball striking it picks up too far and any poor strikes it seems to get about right. I just don't see me hitting 205 7 irons on a grass range ever. I don't play irons longer than a 7 as my set doesn't have any so my 7 is my baseline.

[CAPDAK]

I’ve joined an indoor simulator called Swing 365. When I started a month ago, I would use my 7 iron for 160 yard shots. As I continued to go there day after day, for these weeks, my number for the 7 iron went to 170, and then 180. It’s amazing how far a ball will go with a smooth, proper swing. I haven’t hit over 189 with roll out with a 7 though.

The one thing I would be concerned about with a sim bar is their settings. In that type of environment, they may tweak settings to boost people’s performance since a happy customer is a returning and generous customer.

If I had your situation, I would try a ball with more markings to see if that changes anything. Something seems to be confusing the unit. I just have the original skytrak and I’ve found it to be pretty consistent, so I’m not sure what would be going on with the ST+ that is causing you problems.

[Adrian777]

I came here looking for this specific issue.
i have had a Skytrak since around 2016 and had no issues with it. I have just bought a Mevo+ with pro package and face impact because it gives me some info I now need that the Skytrak doesn’t. However, I immediately noticed that my carry distances seemed poor on the Mevo+ compared to the Skytrak. So much so, I decided to measure the same shots with both units.
interestingly, both units measured the clubhead speed and ball speed almost exactly the same, but the Mevo+ consistently reports the carry distances 15 yards less than Skytrak.
This is obviously of great concern. I contacted Mevo support and they want to talk to me as I am setting up the unit and hitting shots. I sent the info to my pro and he thinks on balance the Mevo+ is probably correct. He sent me a Trackman table of LPGA average distances, which show a 7 iron with a ball speed of 104mph going 141 carry. Skytrak was showing me much more than this on a similar ball speed.
I never questioned the Skytrak numbers in all the years I have been using it. They seemed to be pretty much correct on the course.
i will check it out with Mevo support and ensure the unit is set up correctly, but I came away feeling pretty depressed. I am trying to improve. Now it seems I hit it 15 yards less than I thought.

[Calo]

I came here looking for this specific issue.
i have had a Skytrak since around 2016 and had no issues with it. I have just bought a Mevo+ with pro package and face impact because it gives me some info I now need that the Skytrak doesn’t. However, I immediately noticed that my carry distances seemed poor on the Mevo+ compared to the Skytrak. So much so, I decided to measure the same shots with both units.
interestingly, both units measured the clubhead speed and ball speed almost exactly the same, but the Mevo+ consistently reports the carry distances 15 yards less than Skytrak.
This is obviously of great concern. I contacted Mevo support and they want to talk to me as I am setting up the unit and hitting shots. I sent the info to my pro and he thinks on balance the Mevo+ is probably correct. He sent me a Trackman table of LPGA average distances, which show a 7 iron with a ball speed of 104mph going 141 carry. Skytrak was showing me much more than this on a similar ball speed.
I never questioned the Skytrak numbers in all the years I have been using it. They seemed to be pretty much correct on the course.
i will check it out with Mevo support and ensure the unit is set up correctly, but I came away feeling pretty depressed. I am trying to improve. Now it seems I hit it 15 yards less than I thought.

Interesting to see the Mevo comparison. I have an SC400 portable lidar based monitor which I would take on the range with me and sometimes it seemed very accurate and other times not even close (even with properly struck shots). It almost seemed like the Sc400 would get less accurate as the session went on when outdoors. The SC400 only works with well struck shots as any sort of off line or bladed shot it can't deal with and gives erroneous distances. I have set that up for some shots while on the skytrak and the swing speeds are way higher than the skytrak, the ball speeds match within 2 mph but the distances are all over the place indoors. A decently flushed 9 iron will show 117 carry yards on the SC400 when it would be hard to hit a 9 only 117 yards and the Skytrak will show 150 yards carry. The launch angles are totally mismatched between the two as well. Even the SC400 then isn't helping confirm the Skytrak other than mostly matching ball speeds. Some shots on the Sc400 would show club head speed faster than ball speed when ball speed wasn't matching the ST. That is to say the SC400 would show a blank for smash factor as it didn't pick up the proper ball speed and thought you swung faster than the ball speed when it wasn't reasonable for that to have happened. The SC400 can do spin but only if you connect it to your app and I've read it is not accurate there so I don't bother comparing spin since I don't connect it to the app. Basically, other than ball speed, the SC400 isn't giving me much data to go on.

[GordieD]

If your course numbers are close to SkyTrak, then I would assume that the Mevo+ numbers are off. Mevo+ requires significant space behind the hitting (8' I believe) area as well as in front of it and also marked balls.