Just Bought A SkyTrack! Best In-Living Room Setup? Help!

[Astrongtower]

Hello Everyone!

This is such a great forum for Golf Simulators!

A little history about me. I took a golf lesson in college and never went anywhere with it. I took it seriously but it just didn't stick. Now however I am absolutely obsessed with the game for various reasons. I am naturally competitive so its a great game for that. However the main reasons are 1. For my wife and I to spend time together. 2. Have a great sport to do the rest of my life outdoors. 3. And its great for business.

I am a brand new golfer that has hit a zillion balls on the driving range and played a hand full of small courses and a couple of nice courses. I would say that I am a horrible golfer but getting better very quickly do to how much I am practicing. Let me put it this way, I have band aids all over my hands. LOL!

My main point for this post is to build the ultimate indoor golfing simulator that is portable but yet efficient that can operate actually in a living room. Yes it will be a pain to put up and down but yet actually not when you get use to it. I got the idea from this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4LPShxBklk

He uses plastic balls, but I found the perfect golf balls that work perfectly with the Skytrak:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I play in a full finished basement in the living room. I do not really want to leave it there but sometimes I do. What I am using now is:

This mat:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This net:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This device:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

And the SkyTrak

Everything works great except for the net. Its to small because I already put a golf ball imprint in the wall of my living room when I put in a real golf ball sometimes. Plus at the bottom when I have a really low shot, it makes an extremely loud noise when it hits against the black plastic bottom. I will be returning this net.

I will be replacing the net with this net:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Yes this is much bigger but will absolutely work in my case. It will catch all of my balls and will be easy to put away but I might just leave it up sometimes.

Here is what I was originally thinking:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...=ATVPDKIKX0DER

https://www.amazon.com/Impact-Screen...+IMPACT+SCREEN

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...=ATVPDKIKX0DER

With a projector or something. However someone told me that it might fall over. So I am waiting at this point.

MY QUESTION!

I am using a high end laptop with my set up above against a net in the living room and a SkyTrak.

I would really like to either get a 65 inch TV and hook up the SkyTrak to that or get a projector and mount it to the wall and project it on a screen that I could put up and down.

I am really new to this but I was wondering if anyone else had done this or has any ideas for me? I really want to do this and all the help would be great.

Let me know your thoughts! Thanks!

[GmanJeff]

As a fellow new golfer, I'd recommend caution - in my case I started out with a triangular Rukket net which was easily collapsible, but it proved too easy for me to miss the net and to send balls into the walls and ceiling of the spare bedroom I was using for practice. Even Almost Golf balls put dents in the walls, although not as bad as the ones form real balls. After buying my ST, I bought a Net Return net with the side netting, and put it in front of a 42" TV in my basement. I have still managed to send a flyer outside the net's capture area, but very infrequently. A bigger issue for me has been the occasional shank to the ST, pretty much destroying the protective case which is sacrificing itself to keep the ST unit itself functional.

The TV has proven to be hard to see clearly at the detail level through the netting, and I'm unsure whether a larger screen will help. As it is, I have my laptop on a stand at about a 45 degree angle between me at address and the net, and I find it easy enough to just look at the laptop's screen after each shot. The laptop is closer to me than the TV, which is about 11' away, and is not obscured at all by the netting. It is also in a position where it has not been threatened by any bad shots, at least so far!

So, a few conclusions from my experience - be prepared for potential damage caused even by Almost Golf balls, so select your room accordingly, and in my case a laptop has worked out fine alone. I'll probably try a bigger TV when I advance to using sim software, planned for later this year along with a new laptop using the Nvidia GTX1080 GPU.