Labradars in EE

mileageman said:
F*** LabRadar. People have been begging them to make a better app, update their product, use wifi instead of bluetooth, etc for years. It has fallen on deaf ears. It is their own fault they will no longer be the chronograph of choice. While there have been a couple different competitors in the last couple of years, none have really taken off. This Garmin unit looks to be the real deal.
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They also made the business decision to not increase production over these last years, leaving innumerable potential customers unable to buy one.

It's difficult to evaluate if this was the right business decision. They might have known a competitor was going to cut them off at the knees in the near future and decided not to invest in production.

Labradar had a good run while it lasted. It was an important milestone for shooters, but ultimately a small step towards the real game changer: the ability to capture every shot muzzle velocity with a small gadget mounted on the rifle.
 
adamg said:
I've only seen the Labradar successfully capture downrange speeds as far as about 100m.

With muzzle speed and downrange speed out to 100m, it is not possible to generate BC values that are more useful or accurate for longer shots; compared with measuring elevation drop of impacts at longer distances. So in my opinion, this feature is useless. If it could provide speeds out to 1000m, like the professional chronos that Hornady and Applied Ballistics use, then it would have a chance at being useful. I say have a chance, because just speed vs distance data alone does not tell you the BC or BC-mach curve without some fancy calculation software that is not publicly available, so Labradar would have to make that software available, too.
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How far it reads depends largely on how well you aim it, but yes, it only reads so far. This doesn't make the information useless. What the BC is in the region that it does read is directly related to what the BC is as it continues on a longer journey. And it is dead simple to calculate what the BC is from the data it gives you. And there is plenty of software that's publicly available that does this, including open source ones freely available on the web, such as Labrabaco. You just need to have good data on the current temperature, atmospheric pressure, and relative humidity. This information is easily available in a number of ways. The results you can glean from this information are also useful in other ways, such as comparing how consistent different lot numbers of bullets are, and/or simply comparing their average BCs directly to each other. BC is different for every single shot because every single bullet is different. This gives you another way to measure how similar or dissimilar they all are to each other. You can't do that with just the muzzle velocity. I have to say, if all I cared about was muzzle velocity it looks like the Garmin would be the device of choice at the moment. It isn't fussy to set up and use, and the LabRadar has known issues. If you only want muzzle velocity the Garmin looks awesome. Some of us would like more data than that, though, because we can do more things with more data. Maybe they can do that in v2, or maybe even just a firmware update. For now, though, I'll stick with my LabRadar because I need all that extra data.
 
I don't see reading downrange as being a big issue, if you half ass trust yourself, you have a 10" reading window vertically on the Garmin. I know I'd have no issues with a reasonably well trusted load in setting the Garmin up at 300 to get a reading there at least, doubt Lab Radar will read to 300 with any regularity. I shot arrows over my Oehler at 50 yds, with the diffusers on, no big deal, worked fine. No law says you can't build a shield for the Garmin either, to go further out with it. You may miss a shot on a wind call out of the cone, that shud be about it though. If you've done speed tests and worked up dope at 100, and shot a few rds at say 5-700, you shud be in a position to trust the load at that range anyway, all you want from it is a speed reading at that distance, if you are that scared of killing a chrono, that means you don't trust the load to start with.
 
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The Xero worked well in the backyard at lunchtime with the Red Ryder
 
Taking a muzzle velocity reading of shot A (or group A of shots) and a then moving the device downrange to get a downrange velocity reading of shot B (or group B of shots) does certainly give you some more useful info than only taking muzzle velocity readings. However, this does not tell you as much as you are told when you can get multiple readings of the same shot as it travels down range. Having even just two readings from the same shot tells you a lot more than you can learn from seperate readings taken at different times and distances. I do concede, not everybody's going to be interested in that info, and muzzle velocity is all the majority of people are interested in. And if that's all I cared about, my LabRadar would be in the EE, too, hehe. But I like the additional info I can learn with the LabRadar compared to what I can learn with the Garmin or any other brand that only gives you one reading. I like being able to confirm how consistent rounds are with each other in as many ways as possible. And getting the BC of every single shot is another metric for that endeavour. That's impossible with the Garmin unless you buy more than one to use simultaneously. Though even doing that would be worse than the LabRadar, as you typically get a reading every millisecond with the LabRadar, which gives you a much more reliable trendline rather than just two sample points that you'd get with two Garmins.
 
_Shorty said:
not everybody's going to be interested in that info, and muzzle velocity is all the majority of people are interested in.
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I've done the JBM ballistics BC calculation, based off average retained downrange speeds via Labradar. Results can be interesting for comparisons, but for calculating trajectory for long range shooting, I'd trust the info from sources like Applied Ballistics or Hornady 4DOF
 
todbartell said:
I've done the JBM ballistics BC calculation, based off average retained downrange speeds via Labradar. Results can be interesting for comparisons, but for calculating trajectory for long range shooting, I'd trust the info from sources like Applied Ballistics or Hornady 4DOF
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I'd be interested in hearing how your JBM results compare to Labrabaco's results with the same input data, if you kept a record when you did it last, and still have the LabRadar files handy. It basically does the work for you right off the files, and you just need to enter the atmostpheric data. https://bc.geladen.ch/labrabaco/labrabaco.html
 
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