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Hello everyone....1st time poster but have reading these boards for over a month now. I am the Director of Golf at Lake Hickory CC in Hickory, NC and we just finished converting an old billiards room in our men's locker room into an indoor hitting room.I decided to go with the Skytrak unit and I have to say I have been very impressed with the numbers and accuracy of this unit. Outside of a few syncing issues discussed on this board I have found the numbers and distances to be very accurate, including drivers! Let me first start off by saying that when I started hitting balls I thought the yardages were a bit on the short side but as I got use to hitting in a closed environment (indoors), my yardages started to increase to where I thought they should be. Let's face it, there is nothing natural about swinging indoors especially with a screen 8 feet in front of you. My tendency was to hang back and not complete my follow through. After a while I got comfortable with hitting into an impact screen and my yardages increased. As far as drivers go, all I can say is I have not had any issues with low/ bad numbers. As far as my room set-up goes, we have just two track lights shining down onto the hitting mat so the room is not dark but it is not bright either. I am using an EZ Tee Poly mat and I sit the unit directly onto the mat. This is the same mat we use on the back of our driving range and I have been pleased with it. I am really looking forward to the PGA show next week and keeping my fingers crossed that simulation with TGC or PG is available sooner rather than later.
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Last edited by AUfanHKY; 01-22-2016, 06:30 PM. -
Took me over a month to get comfortable hitting indoors. Sim room ceiling height is 8ft 8inches. I think a lot of people struggle with swinging full out indoors especially with longer clubs. This explains why most people believe ST undersetimates driver and 3wood distances when they first get the machine. Having said that it is completely unfair to suggest that everyone that complains about skytrak distances is being irrational. That seems to come across in some of these posts. -
I think people really underestimate how they swing indoors. As you say it's just not natural. Worst case outside the ball goes flying off to side or wherever with no threat of injury or damage. When you swing indoors whether or not you are cognizant of it, i think it may be in the back of your mind somewhere that there's no telling where a ball might end up going. Even if you think your setup is bulletproof, bring some high caps around, they will expose any design flaws.
This isn't to discount everyone who believes it's short, there have been bad units out there for sure.Comment
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Certainly not suggesting that there are no defective units out there. I am sure there are owners who are getting bad numbers for whatever reason and I feel bad for them.Comment
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Has I posted in many threads I believe I had a faulty unit. But why would woods be 30 yards different from a gc2 and the irons were dead on.
Since using my gc2 I have average on the pg tour over 280 and had drives over 300. With Skytrak the most I could get was 246 with a rollout of 253. I will try this weekend to see if I can get the data from sky golf 360 and I will show you how short Skytrak was. Not just with driver but 3 wood and my hybrid.Comment
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In my case, I believe its ball speed that is short. Spin launch angle look great. Willymakit and his 30 yard comment would put me right on the money with what I saw all year at the range. My driver total distance was around 293 avg and my carry was over the 270 yd marker. My skytrak says 242 carry 259 total add 30 and it would be right there. I haven't tried raising the skytrak to compensate for the tee height yet. I don't believe that is going to increase by ball speed measurement though.
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I don't want to make anyone made, but I'm still waiting for the post where someone who's having difficulty shows a side by side, same shot, comparison with GC2 or trackman/FS...etc. that shows widely different measurements.
Not calculated parameters, like carry, but those that are measured.
To my knowledge, no one has done this....have they? Seems like it's more the other way around, where they prove to themselves that they are indeed swinging differently indoors.
People shouldn't be offended by this too since everyone new to sim'in does it, you are indeed hitting a golf ball indoors!Comment
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Why I believe my Skytrak distance was so off was the spin that Skytrak was showing. With the driver I was getting upwards of 5000 back spin and that's what was knocking the distance way down.
With the gc2 with the driver I haven't seen a back spin of over 3000 yet and I'm averaging around the 2500-2600 mark.
but what I don't understand is why my irons were spot on. For example a 7 iron showed back spin of 7200. Or a sand wedge of 10,000 or a 3 iron at 3100.
But I'm glad I dont have to worry about that anymore and instead playing golf
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Hmm. Maybe with your ball speeds and the "low"ish spin, their algorithm for tracking dimples was actually doubling it? I'm assuming you've changed nothing since switching to GC2? Same exact ball, driver, tee height...etc.?
Evidence like that is what makes sense to me. Not just the "my woods are short" type posts. Those posts, without some kind of backing, are the ones I suspect that the user is swinging differently indoors, and I said, understandably.
I'm glad for you too! Hopefully cya out "there" soon! Almost setup...Comment
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If you have a bad ST unit and your LA is high compared to average then you might see unresonable spin numbers because ST will guess based on LA and ball speed using typical numbers if it fails to measure the spin.
There is no way for us normal users to see if the spin for any particular shot was measured or estimated. I don't know but a resonable guess is that people with ball speed around 160MPH are more likelly to detect a faulty unit than those that have a much lower BS.Comment
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I think that's the first time we've heard of the unit estimating a data parameter that's claimed to be measured, although be that you're saying it does this only if it doesn't have the confidence in what was measured.
That's quite a big issue in my mind. Especially since it doesn't point this out when it's estimated, like you say.
If I were a skytrak owner I'd want skytrak to confirm or deny this... -
I'm sure the gc2 does this also. It would be reckless not to. The real issue is how often it has to fall back onto guessing. -
The camera field of view is limited. So if you start high and launch high it might not get a good image of the ball. The ST IR FLASH is mounted very low so I suspect that the upper part of the image is not very well lit. So even if it gets the ball in the view, image will be of lower quality.
As for the estimating vs. measuring. Yes the GC2 probably does this as well. Difference is that GC2 has 4-5 images to work from on any driver shot while ST has 2. The quoted tolerances for side and backspin are theoretical and indicate what pixel resolution the ball has. E.g. GC2 has more pixels / ball. I have both and made a side by side comparison. For normal shots with any clubs that where struck well. They where very similar on all parameters. For not so well struck shots like a thin 7 iron or a 5-6 deg push or pull. There was a significant difference where the GC2 produced more reasonable spin numbers.
The ST unit does report confidence level as a % but for obvious reasons Skygolf does not want us to see that number. (No I am not going to tell you how I know this)
Anybody ask them self's lately why we still can't see or calibrate the accelerometer value? To add that feature is a 10min job for the programmers.
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My woods are short sorry! 5 iron out to 200. 4 hybrid 200. 3 hybrid 205. 2 hybrid 210. Irons great woods not C'Mon man. I still love my skytrak!
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Goat's logic is correct. If you only quote carry distances here on the forum, there is no real way for us to help you figure out what's going on. We need some ball data.Comment
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Willymakit, these are numbers from your defective SkyTrak or the new one they sent you later? Thanks. -
Yes this was from my first unit data. When I received the second one and only hit a handful of shots and then sold it on eBay. I don't think I even hit the driver with it
And this was in my house. I didn't have Skytrak and gc2 side by side. Just going by numbers that I remember seeing on Skytrak. There was no change but using a different simulator and prov1 balls. With the gc2 and hard balls I'm getting 2000-2200 and over 300 yards.
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Sorry for being unclear. I was just talking in general, but referring to coz. Wily, I remember the deal with yours- it is a great example of where you providing the data helped us figure out the spin definitely seemed off.Comment
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I might get time today to get some numbers. The skytrak range is better than wgt. I take a hit on the range but a huge hit on wgt. I think the numbers are only posted for a split second on wgt and i really focused on the total distance of the tee. On a rare occasion I'll get 240 but most the time only 200 ish give or take a couple yards. Sometimes not even 200 and no appreciably difference from 4 hybrid thru 3 wood. So when i play a round on wgt i use the straightest club hybrid and play 200 off the tee. From there its cool with the irons in. I play a lot of challenges cause I'm using irons. You will see my name on most all of the challenges.Originally posted by TorchRedRob
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my unit was suppose to be new but when i look thru its history it shows quite a few hours registered on it for the spring of 2015??? Hundreds of hours. I don't know if that was from skytrak testing or somebody used it then? ?? I received the unit in early december.Originally posted by Willymakit
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QUOTE:
FaultyClubs commented on davray666's reply yesterday, 11:00 PM
I'm sure the gc2 does this also. It would be reckless not to. The real issue is how often it has to fall back onto guessing.
I don't think the GC2 will look at the numbers and if one is out of wack, send a default. For one it has no idea what club you use and does not care. Two, I have had issues with white headed woods where the head gets picked up as the ball and you can get a 45 deg left ball path and a weird LA with weird spin. The result is a ball that goes 10 yards carry or so massively to the left and is an obvious miss read. To correct this I use a black tape on all white parts of the clubs.
Also with the new technology in Drivers with high LA and low back spin, the GC2 does not adjust the drives with 1500 to 2000 backspin. Those numbers would have never been seen a few years back.
Mountain TimeComment
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I don't think the gc2 does this either as I've had shots read ball speed, launch and not display spin or side spin. Very rare, but does happen.
Maybe this is another bug, but I attributed it to a unconfident spin reading, and just it didn't report a spin number...Comment
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