ShotMarker Electronic Target

alright welcome back folks today I want to talk about this kit right here this is the shot marker electronic target system you might have seen this over on Gavin tube recently he's got a sponsorship or a partnership or whatever with these guys and he's been showing up several their products recently and this is the one that caught my eye you basically got four of these microphone things each one has two of these ultrasonic microphones these go at the four corners of your target and they sense supersonic bullets as they pass by so that's the first limitation you got to be aware of the bullet needs to be supersonic when it gets to the target for this system to work down on the target end you get this right here this is the sensor hub you can see it's easily labeled here for each of the four color-coded microphone sensors and there are standard audio jacks that connect each sensor here to the hub it's got a little antenna on top standard SMA connectors and in the wiring kit you actually get an antenna extension right here where you know this would connect to the hub and then you can mount this up high to get that antenna up high in case you're having signal problems now there's a competitor called Silver Mountain targets that sells a system called the solo it's very similar but the main reason why I went with this one well first of all I was able to actually you know see it over on Gavin tube and kind of see what the interface looked like and I liked what I saw but this does not use Wi-Fi from the target to your access point up at your firing line or wherever it is it uses a different system called Laura or Laura lor a which stands for long range it's a low throughput long range communication protocol that came out here over the last few years so this system it's going to be able to connect as far as you can keep bullets supersonic this guy is probably going to be able to connect now you know I've never seen the solo system maybe the Wi-Fi antennas they're using it or super directional and it gets plenty of range as well I don't know but I decided to go with the shot marker the shot marker is also a little bit cheaper this kit is $7.99 that gets you a single target set up this is about 850 so pretty close but hey 50 bucks is 50 bucks each of these has an internal battery you'll see a microUSB on the front of each for charging and I need to double check the manual here real quick there it is so your access point which is up at your firing line the internal battery lasts for 18 hours the one down at the target the sensor hub lasts for a hundred hours so over four days of battery on a single charge that was another big thing about that Laure protocol it's supposed to be you know very energy efficient use very little you know power so a hundred hours is awesome and over Gavan tube he hooked his up to a solar panel that he mounted to the target so you know that should work indefinitely you would think so that's the basic setup since her hub goes at the target the four sensors microphones whatever you want to call them connect to the sensor hub the access point gets turned on and they just they immediately connect it's dead simple there's absolutely nothing you have to do and we'll talk about it later but it's it's honestly a little bit too simple I wouldn't mind a little more configuration options but you turn it on and on the back here is the IP 192 168 100.1 as far as I know they're all the same you point a web browser to that and you're in business that's it so it could not be simpler to get it connected and talking in the accessory kit I already covered the antenna extension I'm not gonna be needing this I want to primarily be using this at 100 200 yards but it's awesome to have it just in case in the future I need a little extra range a couple microUSB cables to connect the charging ports that's fine we've all got drawers full of those don't we and it came with six audio cables two of each length so this tan one is kind of the extra long and I think this silver one is the short and then I think there's a white that's in between I don't know they're connected to my target frame which you'll see here in just a few minutes both these come with velcro already installed on the back and you get the other the other half of that velcro you get some screws for connecting your sense basis which like I mentioned these are you know color-coded bases they connect with a magnet to a base so the bases are already on my target frame you'll see those here in just a second or maybe I'll throw in a picture here they snap on magnetically it's a very secure fit and they only stick one direction so you never have to worry about installing a sensor pointing the wrong way and there are a couple female-to-female audio connectors for in case you need a longer cable then the longest one you can yeah splice a couple of them together with these butt connectors and get some additional length as I mentioned the kit is $7.99 not exactly cheap but then again it could be worse now in my case my hope is that this is basically going to be my new target camera right because in my videos up to this point you know I have a camera downrange like this is my current target camera and I have to film the targets in 4k so that I can you know crop in close and still have a clear picture on my groups and stuff it's a pain in the butt the 4k video cut files are gigantic I always have to worry about the battery running out or the memory card filling up and then editing those huge 4k files is awful well this cost more than this kit so for me I can kind of justify it as okay this is my new replacement for this guy that's got you know several years of good service not to mention you guys some some of you might remember this one that we hit with a bullet same same camera as that one so for me it's basically like buying a camera so that's how I justified it in my crazy mind and especially with you know the sensor hub has a hundred hour battery plus I could you know put in like it'll run while charging so I could get if I didn't want to go solar like Gavin tube did I could go with just a basic USB charging bank that I've got a bunch of you know for charging up devices a portable battery you know portable charger thingy so I could leave one of those hanging out downrange and running this so I could put this out on a Friday evening and spend all weekend making out on the range and never even walked down range once so a lot of advantages for me I'm hoping it's gonna help me put out more videos quicker now the buying experience was not perfect this company really needs to put some work into the customer experience because well I ordered on September 3rd the website said that the lead time was approximately five to six weeks it still says that today as I make this video so I prepared myself for a long wait one good thing I'll say is they do not charge you until it ships so that was nice but so I ordered September 3rd six weeks comes and goes I'm coming up to the end of October you know we're almost to two months almost to eight weeks and I'm starting to think I'm gonna have to call these people like I got an order confirmation email but I was thinking my order got lost something's going on what has happened but I decided to just hold off like I'm knocking I don't I don't ever want to be that guy who you know wears people out with the emails and phone calls where's my crap where's my crap whatever plus I wasn't really shooting much at the time so it was like yeah you know I can I can live with a couple extra weeks well finally on November 1st my bank sends me uh you know a fraud alert not nothing to get like they do this all the time any large purchase they they send you text message you know and you have to confirm that it's legit that sort of deal and especially when it's from out of the country that this is a Canadian company by the way so that happened November 1st so that was awesome okay so there's my mic it's in the mail I checked my email there's no shipping notification email so I continued to be patient I waited a week still nothing no emails no info I verified that yep my bank did get the charge and hid my credit card all of that stuff but I've heard nothing from these people finally on November 12th a box arrives at my P o box and this is the kit so about ten weeks said approximately five to six was what you expect and it ended up being right about ten with yeah the most hilarious thing though is three days after I picked it up on November 15th I get shipping confirmation email with a tracking number so this so this was not a smooth process here folks I would have really appreciated an email I don't make up any excuse just tell me you know maybe maybe we're coming up on that five to six week window when I should expect my stuff and you know get an email hey I'm waiting on parts one of our suppliers is being slow your order is gonna be several weeks late that would have been such a comfort just being left in the dark kind of sucked the shipping label on the box shows that it was created on November 1st it made its way to the post office on November 4th and then they sent the email with the tracking number on the 15th so that's all pretty ridiculous it took them four four days to get it boxed up and in the mail and 11 more days to send me an email so I've had plenty of time to think about what might have happened and always wondered along the way like the biggest customer here I think our ranges like you know they want to buy ten at a time and outfit an entire range so maybe a little guy like me ordering a single little kit just gets kind of pushed to the end of the line while the bigger orders get filled I don't know or maybe these are just built in batches it's almost like a group buy you know he gets X number of orders and then he builds some and shipped them and I just happened to time it wrong like I was right after the last batch and had to wait on the next and another thing that makes me think that might have been what's going on is well like I mentioned the the videos over on Gavin tube for all of the other products were released months ago but the shot marker video over there was just released on November 4th right after I think it was November 4th right around that time which was on basically the same day that mine reached the post office so I'm assuming you know he was told to hold off on that video until they were available again or there was stock again that's my best guess so this is you know this is an easy fix though update that estimate on the website every once in a while you know so that it's accurate you know send an email to people whenever the estimated shipping time isn't gonna be met like hey man like I said waiting on parts sorry it's going to be a while at least you know and on the shipping confirmation don't wait 15 days to send people their tracking number those are all easy fixes so that's enough of that let's leave the negative stuff behind now let's get on to seeing what this system can do let me think is there anything else I'll need to cover just one or two more things before we get on the range the sensor hub the thing that you know goes down range where all of your sensors connect this is the expensive part if you just want to buy one of these it's $500 so the whole kit was $7.99 that's one awesome thing all of the accessories like if you need to buy a replacement sensor it's $40 that seems completely reasonable if you want to buy a whole kit of four of them you can get that for $150 if you need another access point these are $100 so the accessories are priced really nice you can basically put together the kit piece by piece and the price is just barely more so he's not galgioni on accessories but like I said the sensor hub is $500 now of course I would love to have a target frame that's all set up and ready to rock at like I have a hundred yards and 200 yards on my range in my backyard I'd love to have permanent target frame installations at both distances but you're looking at another $700 basically to have a second target frame and they've got pre-configured kits like I bought the single target kit they have a to target kit it just comes with one access point but it comes with two of everything else that sort of deal another thing they sell that I think is pretty reasonable they've got a pre-configured 8 inch tablet you can get for $99 now unfortunately I've got a couple tablets and they're both 10 inches are a little bit bigger so they won't fit in the in the bag or anything but the 8 inch tablet will slide right down in the bag and store with the kit and it's already pre-configured ready to go it's got a link right there on the home screen it opens up the web browser in full-screen mode and all of that stuff so it's completely ready to go 8 inch tablet for it for an additional 99 bucks now most of my I have tested I've got a one of these is like a Lenovo Android tablet and the other is my iPad I tested both of these with the system and they work great but I'm going to be using a laptop out at my shooting bench like I mentioned this is kind of a almost like a target camera for me so I'm piping my bench camera into the laptop and this system connecting with the laptop and then recording directly there on the laptop that would be a little more difficult on a tablet but an average user you're probably going to want to use a tablet and I think the interface is really optimized for use with a tablet but pretty much anything that'll run a web browser join a Wi-Fi network and connect to that IP is probably going to work for you alright that's enough talking let's get out to the range and see what - see what it's like to use this thing and see how precise it is because that's my biggest worry alright folks I've pulled out my Thompson Center compass chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor to put the first shots on-target it's pretty close to zero dry now so hopefully we can be pretty close before we do that let me run you through the interface so you open up any web browser I've tested it with Firefox and Chrome seems to work equally good with both the address is 192.168.1 hundred dot one and you're immediately presented with this interface up at the top left this little guy right here are your access point options so you can pop it up and see battery remaining storage capacity date and time and then some display preferences if you want to overlay a grid you can do so with a 1 MOA grid or a point 2m mil grid so here's the 0.2 Mildred that's what your target looks like with that overlaid so we're going to turn that off for right now you can choose to display velocity in feet per second meters per second or turn it off we're gonna leave it on we're gonna want feet per second you can get your stats your group size statistics and whatnot and inches millimeter MOA mil or score like target face score for the time being we're gonna leave this on MOA this shot spark where you can I guess delay shots and only show recent shots I think this is crap that's mainly for matches I want to see them all until I clear them or something you know so we're going to leave to all ciders also that's match stuff or if you're shooting a target face for score or something maybe you'd want to change that we're going to leave that to none caliber 264 is correct here for my 6.5 Creedmoor and admin lock right now this one's open you can choose different levels of lockdown for matches and whatnot where you don't want spectators to be able to change settings this is also where we this show all targets I still don't know for sure exactly what that's about yeah we'll leave it set to show all targets the shot simulator we'll use here in just a second switch channel is the Wi-Fi channel that's being used by your access point so if yeah if you need to switch the channel or if there are multiple shot marker access points in the area I think you have to switch channel here before the second one will power on it's like yeah two of them won't go active at the same time I believe is what I read in the manual export CSV yeah dumps you out spreadsheet basically I guess I don't know if that settings or data or what maybe you will play with that later but don't really care that much you can save a backup restore backup and do a software update mine right now is version 1.0 8 from december 17th of 2018 and that's the last version i see on their website so that's kind of the access point settings the next bubble over are your target settings you can see battery remaining we can see our signal level right now I've got our society negative 93 my access point is actually in the house about 75 yards behind me sitting in a window and the target isn't 100 yards so still plenty a signal there's a sensor monitor we can see right now we have no sensor event so we need to put some shots downrange and then we'll come back and have a look at that you can name your target frames you enter the center to Center distance between your sensors in millimeters mine is 673 millimeters wide and 730 millimeters high and what we're going to start with here in just a few minutes is this calibrate function so we'll be back into here in just a second the next bubble over here is your target face and you can choose lots of different targets so here's an IBS benchrest hundred-yard target so if we choose that guy that's what we get that looks a little bit familiar from our 6 PPC videos right just the standard IBS Pintrest target and there are tons more this is also where you change your dist so if we're shooting 200 yards or 10,000 yards this is where we would put that in so if we scroll back up here to the top under miscellaneous this is where there's a low development target which let's have a look at that guy real quick see it looks like that and you can download and print this target on their website and there's a few other generic targets here like here's a quarter-inch dot it's just a single tiny little dot in the middle of the target several dots here are some rings yeah there you go and I think what I'm probably gonna use a lot is this diamonds you can also download and print this from the website as well and that's a pretty good target I downloaded it and printed it and it looks like these diamonds are 2 inches apart so that's probably just about right for my needs so that's it for targets I'll try and scroll slowly here so in case you're looking for a specific target or want to make sure that it's available hopefully you'll be able to see it and I think I read somewhere on the website that they will add additional targets if you request it so that's all good now the two over here on the right which I probably need to kind of scroll the screen over a little here there we go we're kind of useless to us right now we click on it and nothing happens and over here is where you open previous saved strings and we haven't done any of that so let's create one really quick and what we want to do or simulate some shots so I think that's over here in the access point configuration shot simulator and we click OK and you see DoubleTap to simulate a shot let's put a couple shots over here there's 1 2 3 4 5 so now we can see this starts filling out you can see five shots point six six MOA average velocity 23 27 standard deviation 16 point O so it takes velocities at the target which is pretty darn cool now over here you can scroll through the different shots and it'll you know highlight each one you can also click on the shot down here and it'll bring it up there and if you click here it gives you the option to hide that shot or declare it a cider so if we declare this one a cider now if we look over in our shot string over here on the right we can see that it now says s1 and I think if we click again we can switch it back to record I tell you what let's zoom in on the group here real quick if we choose the hide option there we go you'll see that it still shows this little gray outline of it so you know there are hidden shots and also this thick grey bar here tells you that there's a hidden shot so if we simulate a couple more shots there we go we see that that gray bar remains it tells you that there's one or more hidden shots between those numbers so if we go to click on four and then click to the right we see yeah hidden right there and we can unhide it recover it and now we're back to eight shots so hopefully that makes sense now one really cool thing we need to turn off shot simulator first so let's disable the shot simulator but if we're about to start shooting a second group or something we can outline our different groups so if I double click now it comes up with this box that you can drag around and you can resize oh yeah let's let's resize this guy down and it tells you what's going on inside of that box eight shots 0.85 MOA wide 0.9 0 MOA a high velocity standard deviation and let's see let's turn to simulator back on and let's generate some shots outside of the box you'll see they don't affect those statistics there now the biggest problem with this is we don't get you know a normal group size in MOA we get whipt and we get height I wish he gave a you know standard group size like we get up here because if you'll see up here this is all of the shots 11 shots 2.73 MOA that's all the way across that includes all 11 shots so this is a little bit of a disappointment I wish there was just one more line there and this would be perfect because the way I see you know using this let's turn off the shot simulator and let's add a couple more boxes yeah it's gonna be a little bit tight on real estate here so I can predefined different zones where I plan to shoot groups and we can get statistics on each zoom in a little bit there there we go so these these three shots put 7 1 MOA Y point 4 9 MOA hi oh I just wish it gave us a total group size but it doesn't maybe we can get them to add that Oh another cool thing each of these boxes if you double-click them it comes up and asks you to you know name the group name the group or leave it blank to delete so if we wanted to delete that box we just leave this blank and click OK and it goes away but we don't want to delete it yeah we want to have it here and if we actually type something in here like let's say group 16.5 Creedmoor and click ok it labels it right above so we can put our charge weights and powder type and all that crap and hopefully make a decent looking interface so let's see did we cover everything ok up here if you click on this box here enter a name to save and clear this target so if we call this one test one and click OK the targets now clear if we want to go back and review that then we click over here at the top right and we'll see there's our first test we can reopen it and get back to where we were and this is how you would delete it as well I'm not sure if you can resume shooting let's try that let's turn the shot simulator back on and let's try and add new yep so add in another box that came up you were making changes to a saved string please yeah so it doesn't look like we can continue firing so let's go ahead and delete this permanently delete from the archive yes let's do that all right let's put some shots downrange and see how this is going to work the first thing I want to do let's blank out the target or let's let's just go to quarter-inch dot there we go so basically nothing there then let's go over here and realize we're in the wrong place nope we need to go to the target part there we go and if we click on calibrate and let's say I need to turn off my shot simulator it's still on not there over there alright so that's off and click calibrate again fire a few shots at the calibration seat then drag the group into its true position ok grief my camera is having the hardest time with the Sun staying focused ok that's a little bit better alright let's fire all three and see what happens all right looks like shot marker recorded the group or the shot and it looks like just about in the right spot let's go ahead and shoot the other two all right let's make our browser window big again okay that'll work so if we zoom in and if I give you a look at the target it looks like we are just the tiniest little bit farther to the right on actual paper so shot number two right here is right at the black line so let's click and drag the shots over a little bit about right there maybe let me double check the target again through the scope that looks perfect yeah I think that looks just about perfect so at that point all we need to do is tap here to exit calibration mode and here we are alright there's our three shots so now we should be able to double click here and create a box around them if we want to we see that the average velocity was 23 58 and standard deviation was 3.7 well I happen to have my lab radar turned on and taken numbers and elaborate our tracks velocity out to a hundred yards where this targets at so I should be able to compare the numbers from the lab radar now shot number one lab radar says that the hundred-yard velocity was 2403 and shot marker says 26 or 2363 so exactly 40 feet of difference if we go to shot number two shot marker says 2356 lab radar says 2398 42 feet per second difference and shot number 3 lab radar says 2395 shot marker says 23 55 for a forty feet per second difference i'm not sure what to think about that yet it's in the ballpark like it's it's pretty darn close a little bit of difference there alright so let's see what else can we do here that's cool nothing really I don't think so I wanted to delete this knocks Meredith so just double click on it and it comes up if you wanted to lead it you leave it blank you want to name it you can so there we go cleaned that one up I'll tell you what I'll do let's uh let's switch target well first of all we need to let's delete this shot string and I guess we can go ahead and not there here we click there call it first three shots and that'll clear it out so I printed out some of the diamond targets so if we change our target face to Diamonds 100 there's this guy now let me go down and hang it and we'll shoot a few more a few more shots with the Creedmoor okay so the target is hung up down there now let's get set up to shoot two groups I tried to get the target down they're pretty close to aligned properly but I wasn't quite perfect but after the calibration or shot should hit pretty much where we see on the real life paper I tell you what let's let's shoot these top two center dots or diamonds and let's put boxes around each one like this and we'll go ahead and name it that one's Group 1 and it might be dead squeezed over a little bit here because the second one needs to go squeeze in over here now one thing that's nice is you can move this information scream yeah let's get that one out of the way for a second and if I click here it turns yellow and then I can drag you know I hold and drag it to different spots so let's go more or less in the middle I don't know yeah there goes all right that one wouldn't want and let me move it there for a second but now it's now it's moving we'll name this guy group 2 and kind of got a little bit wonky but that's okay there we go so I think we're ready to shoot okay it's that look okay can you see what you need to see hey and we were shooting high so let's bring the scope down and what was that about a minute and a half maybe yeah we'll see how that goes so let's shoot a five shot group all right so far so good shot marker is calling this a point six six MLA group and here in a few minutes will will be measuring that group to see how close shot marker was so let's keep going let's shoot five more oh crap I forgot to arm my lab radar on that last group I'll do it this time we'll compare statistics again can't believe I forgot that alright it's armed and ready it is an uncharacteristically windy day I'm usually really well protected by the big hills on either side of me but today it's just whipping straight for me towards the target which is kind of good because that's what they say is the challenge for this system like if my target I haven't got it mounted properly and it's down there flopping around it should show up as error in the system I think all right I'll tell you groups on paper down there look on awful lot like our shot marker screen now our second group what size is it who knows we know that it's a point for three MOA widen point three three MOA hi I guess what we could do here is go through and hide the first five shots yeah there we go so now our last five are the only ones being looked at and it shows a point 5 1 MOA group and like I mentioned earlier if we didn't want MOA we can go to I think it's in the access point configuration here and we can choose anything we want here like we could go to mils and you can see it that's a point 1 5 mil group and same thing with inches a millimetre point 5 3 inches or 13 millimeter one thing we should do is look at our shot quality yeah here we go and let's let's unhide to our first 5 that we've got hidden I think we can go yeah right there it shows hidden recover recover recover recover and recover now we're back to 10 shots if we go to our target section here and it looks like we've got measurement quality it's given us five stars yaw and pitch numbers and below for optimal accuracy ensure the sensor brackets are mounted in plane and secure to them and secure the frame so it will not rock in the wind y'all and pitch variation so like I mentioned I've been having some wind here it looks like our yaw and pitch variation is within 0.1 degree and point two degrees so that's good I guess and I think if we go into sensor monitor and we can look through the the shots and see like all of the shots are showing five stars I guess that's good and it's showing all sensors okay so I think we're good at the you know the the time spent trying to make a decent target seems to be worth it so what I want to do is save this of course nope nope not that it click there we go we click here and then it comes up call it six point five oh I've read more groups and save that and I've got a different target I want to hang assuming my camera's gonna focus it probably won't this is an NRA Sr 100-yard military type target now this is what I love to shoot with my mil syrup rifles cuz it's a really good aiming spot for my crappy eyes and their crappy sights so back to shop marker if we click on the target section here and go down to NRA high-power we can select the NRA sr1 look at that nice so let me go hang it and we'll shoot some with a Mosin all right this is my Russian Mosin got a couple hand loads loaded up here with reloader 15 and sierra matchking 174 or 175 I can't remember 311 diameter bullet this gun shot really well with it so let's shoot a couple okay so it looks like we hit way up high which should be no big deal here well first of all I forgot to change our bullet diameter which is over here there it is 308 and if I go into the target thing our normal calibration is +5 millimeter on the X and +1 on the Y but I think we can just change this and bring our shot right to the center is that gonna work yeah there it is so there's our shot pal so let's shoot with that setting yeah I'm getting awfully close to the frame up there yep and we got a warning that says the top left rear sensor fired before the front the bullet may have hit solid material that's not good I'll just aim a little bit lower and the sights are all the way down by the way just shoots high I'll put the front sight post a little bit deeper into the rear sight knotch see if that helps all right a little bit better all right so what I can do now hopefully is go back into the calibration click that again and the group from our new site picture will put that in the center and now hopefully for the next group we should be hitting just about right where we want yeah good all right so now let's save this nope not that click there Mosin group 1 and I noticed a second ago my statistics we're still showing up as millimeters so I want to switch those back to MOA okay there we go all right five more shots here with the Mosin see if this one goes better all right that's better that's much better and if we yeah if we tweak that over a little bit more we're basically sighting in the target for our gun instead of sighting in the gun for the target right calibrate bring it over just a touch and there we are cool so five shots 2.17 MOA pretty cool and then you know if I was done shooting this and wanted to go back to my original settings I can go back into here and manually change the calibration values back I don't remember what our numbers were I'll have to watch the video back to remember what I said but we can zero and back out and we're back to default so let's save note that I keep doing that keep wanting to click there to save but we click there to save let's call this motion group two and I think we're good I'll tell you what let's go down to the target I'll show you around a little bit with how I installed my target frame and we'll see if I put a big hole through the top of it okay so here's my target with that NRA sr1 face on it and one thing I want to show you here is notice I've got a big tree that fell down right at my hundred yard line a few years ago and I'm using that to my advantage yep we get a little closer you'll see the sensor or the sensor hub they call it is mounted low on the left-hand side and it's protected by the tree so hopefully I won't be shooting that guy and you'll see I just used the little antenna connected directly to it and no problem with signal levels here especially at a hundred yards alright so if I get that target face out of the way you'll see my backer here is corrugated plastic these are 24 about 24 inch pieces of corrugated plastic that I bought off of Amazon came in like a 10 pack or something like that so I decided to go with those and my frame design really centered around that so I guess that would be my recommendation is figure out what you're gonna use for a backer and then design a frame around it these up here are the holes from our Mosin and you'll see that little guy right there did indeed hit the frame luckily he just poked a hole through didn't really damage the frame very much I took a pretty insane amount of time putting this together and trying to get all of my measurements exactly the same you know measuring diagonal very closely to make sure I had things perfectly rectangular and I went ahead and obviously marked the coroplast with a one-inch grid and marked the frame as well so whenever I need to change out my backer it should be able should be easy to recreate the frame and get things aligned and like I was talking about on the diamond target believe those are spaced two inches apart so instead of hanging a target I could just come out here and put little dots every two inches or something like that the target face certainly doesn't necessarily need to match what you're viewing in shot marker so if you remember wherever we got that failure whenever I hit the frame it said one of the sensors detected the back microphone before the front yeah see if I can get some Sun here leave like that's what that's what's going on here so that's a microphone and that's the microphone and what it was telling us was that this one detected before this one and the reason why so the frame got hit and the vibration traveled in this direction which is wrong right you expect bullets coming from that direction so that's what that meant and also I don't know if I mentioned it or not about you know using cardboard or corrugated plastic you don't want something that's too rigid like if you put plywood or something here then those vibrations would travel through that backing to the frame and you would get you know constantly get errors from your sensors so you don't want a backing that's too rigid this corrugated plastic seems to work great for the cable management here I didn't really have any clips small enough for these audio cables so I used some of those zip ties that have the little screw hole thingy hanging off the end of them you know tried not to tighten them down too much on the cable but nice and snug where it holds them and then tried to leave plenty of slack to where I can connect the sensor without putting any strain on the cable or anything like that these are nice cables I like that there's plenty of room there to grab onto something and you don't have to feel like you're yanking on the wire itself and then from that one comes down the side picks up the second cable there runs across the bottom and then everything collects here at the sensor hub didn't really make it to pretty here just tried to tie him up and get him out of the way but it seems to seems to have done okay and if I haven't already shown it the brackets are each labeled you know in the up direction and then the back of the sensor if I can find it there it is it's also labeled the same way and it will only go on one way like you try and you know the power of magnetism it doesn't go on it actually you can fill the magnets repelling so it only goes on one way now I wanted to be able to pull the target frame and bring it inside so here at the bottom of the legs I just got some conduit and cut like two foot sections or 18 inch sections and tied them there to the bottom yeah same thing over here on this side so let me go ahead and pull it off of here so I've got two posts that I've drove in with a sledge hammer and what they are are a couple of these guys right here got a pointy end on one end I think these are used for rebar work like laying out a rebar grid or whatever they were in the at the hardware store they were in the section with the with the rebar so these were three feet long so I've probably got about two feet driven down below here they're reasonably stable but it's not quite as stable as I thought it might be I may end up grabbing the post hole digger and digging these out get me a couple bags of concrete and concreting them in place it's actually a pretty decent fit on the conduit there's a little bit of slop but that target frame is so darn heavy that even with you know the high wind today it didn't really move much that I could tell I'm I'll be interested to review the target camera footage and see if it was moving around at all but this guy goes on here pretty easy and here's about yep you can kind of see it rocking a little bit so I think a little concrete on these and then maybe something to take up a little bit of slack that I have between the post and the conduit I mean maybe just a couple layers of electrical tape or something would help I don't know but for right now seems to be working pretty good alright I think that's it let's get back inside alright so before we go inside there's one more thing I meant to this is the day after I was editing the video and realized I never tested rapid-fire and I assume some people are gonna wonder about that how fast this thing can keep up and I don't know myself so let's test it really quick I've got my ar-15 chambered in 223 I've got five shots in a magazine let's shoot them pretty fast and see if the shot marker is able to keep up all right it looks like it did keep up let's zoom in a little bit yeah looking at the target those look perfect just where they should be what I don't understand is why it's saying it's a point five eight MOA group should be more like a two inch group let's see what I screwed up y'all somehow it ended up at 300 yards alright let's set that back to a hundred yards now that makes more sense so 1.74 MOA so let's save this guy as rapid-fire one and this time let's do ten shots and I'll try and speed it up even more see if we can outrun this guy [Music] my stupid recording software I had yeah I screwed that up sorry about that but you see it picked up all ten of them that's pretty impressive that's like really impressive well that's a heck of a lot faster than I'm ever gonna be shooting so I'm gonna call that good enough let's let's say this as rapid-fire - there it is and now let me zoom back out to where we can see the whole target and what I want to do this time is I want to put a couple rounds on target and then I want to put a couple rounds just off target cuz right now you know with the the shots we fired if we go into the target frame section and look at the sensor monitor why it's all well I'm an idiot I cleared the target let's see if I can open rapid fire to back up there it is and see if that wrong one over here their sensor monitor so it looks like shot eight had a warning the bottom right back sensor did not fire all right so it looks like we tripped it up a little bit but not bad it still recorded the shot what was that number eight right there all right so let's close this save string let's zoom out so we can see the whole target and like I was saying I'm gonna put two shots on target and then two shots just barely off target and we'll see what that sensor monitor shows all right so it didn't pick up or didn't try and register I was basically shooting like right here just off the target to the left so let's see if since our monitor yeah so it picked those up and it says measured off target left cool so tell you what let me save this one we'll call this one off target test and I want to do another one very similar but I'm gonna progressively go out farther and farther and see how far it keeps picking them up off target and I'm gonna try and use the reticle on my scope to go in to MOA increments so this first shot to MOA off the right then 4 all right so that was out to 16 ml way off to the off of the right and I'm out of ammo so we'll just call this good enough so let's go into sensor monitor and see what we got so that would be 2 MOA 4 6 8 10 and 12 cool so about a foot well plus a couple more inches for the width of the frame that's not really included in the frame measurement so 12 to 15 inches off the target at a hundred yards it's able to to pick those up and we weren't able to pull it into thinking that any of those were shots within the frame good stuff all right that answers my questions let's get inside now okay so we're back into vanch I don't want to measure out some groups like here are the first three shots we took on the calibration target so let's pull that guy up over here to our saved strings first three shots yeah those are the ones so if we zoom into there I'll tell you what instead of MOA let's switch it so that it shows inches would be in there and stats in inch and I guess we could do a box around it just for the heck of it but we're looking for one point to two inches let me double check make sure that my bullet diameter shouldn't really matter here I wouldn't think but 264 is what we want so I take my calipers and take them out to 264 there we go 264 and then we zero it there that way we're basically subtracting our bullet diameter it's reading 265 now close enough so we're looking for the greatest extreme spread here so edge of that bullet hole to your edge of that bullet hole a little bit smaller than that yep so what I'm getting on my calipers is one point 175 so that's four and a half thousands of difference that's close enough for me all right let's keep going here we've got two more here on I used another one of the calibration targets here because we actually fired these groups at this piece of paper and those of you who have tried to shoot groups on normal printer paper will know that a lot of times they tear and they don't really give you a yeah let's straighten that out yeah they don't give you a very clean thing to measure this one came out a whole lot better than they normally do and I think it was because it was backed up with this stiff board and those are the extra hole these are the entrance holes there we go so we're looking for well I'll tell you what let's pull up that group on shop marker so this this one we're done with will close it close without saving and we'll go ahead and save the changes and then close it and then there we go 6.5 Creedmoor groups that's the next one we want so we need to hide some shots so we can get accurate information here so now we're just looking at the first five shots it's showing a measurement of 0.6 9 0 inches that would be this group right here it's a little bit hard to see on camera but I can see the edges of the bullet holes pretty well so right there - right there and I come up with 0.69 zero inches exactly the same as they get let's double check this paper as well pretty darn close maybe just a touch smaller now that we can see the grease marks yeah about 0.68 three I think point six nine zero is the more accurate measurement there's a little better view of it but ya can see the edges of the bullet holes a little more defined here on the hard paper alright next group let's hide a couple more shots and unhide the ones from the second group there we go there is that group and just a visual look at it comparing the paper to what's on shop marker it looks pretty perfect and we're expecting a point five three so there's from right there to about right there and it's about right there yeah that's 0.55 four so this measurements about 15,000 s larger than shot marker says let's try it over here all right let's see how that looks right about about right there gives us point five four seven so shot marker might have given us a couple thousandths that we didn't deserve on that one but holy crap that's super close I'm not saying we're going to use this for every single video I mean of course anything subsonic any pistol stuff or you know subsonic sand 300 blackout that sort of deal we'll still be using the target camera just like we always have or for something like six PPC where I'm expecting tiny tiny groups I would rather use a standard target and measure those by hand or you know at the very least have a standard target down there so that we can compare what shot marker says versus what we actually see on paper but this is just totally totally impressive there's one part on the website where I think he mentions that you can expect up to a quarter-inch of error which is what really made me nervous and which is why I wanted to try and build the best target I could so I'm hoping to you know get my target mounted a little bit more securely maybe get get rid of some of that let's see where was it let's go back in to here right so this is the yaw and pitch variation I'd love to get rid of those by mounting my target a little bit more securely also I'm not sure between the four censor mounts I'm not sure I've got that completely perfectly in-plane hopefully you get what I'm saying like you lay a straight edge all the way from one sensor mount to the other and it should lay nice and flat on both I do have a little bit of a gap here in there so I might get some really thin washers and put them underneath it you know and try and straighten those out a little bit so maybe a little bit more target work on my part can make things better so before we close the the shot marker interface there are a couple more things I want to look at and kind of review my wish list here and let's save this and then close save it there went and then close it so here's a rundown of my main problems in the target interface the target preview is so small I'd love to see that a little bit bigger so that as you're going through targets you can actually tell them apart and of course I'm picking ones where it's really obvious up there but I mean yeah some of these like the diamonds it's hard to see or like this champion targets telling the difference it's pain in the butt to select them and then have to kind of go back to the big view to see exactly what you're looking at overall that's pretty minor though let's go to quarter-inch dot there the other thing I really found annoying I understand why it's there and I get how you know most people would really like it but you know so I turned on the shot simulator when a shot comes in this shrinking blue halo is really annoying it stays there a long time and once you've you know kind of got a few shots that are close together it's really in the way I'd love the option to turn that off so that as soon as you shoot let's give them another minute here to disappear yeah I'd love to see this as soon as the shots come in I don't mind the last shot being high lighted in yellow like that like that's not a big deal but the blue halo is just a little bit annoying probably my biggest thing like if they could fix one thing which I need to turn off my shot simulator here in our groupings having the the over all the like the extreme spread MOA for each group would be such a help because I'm planning to shoot you know four or five groups at a time before I clear the target and having to hide a bunch of them to get my group measurements up here is a huge pain in the butt so hopefully that's something really easy hopefully that's something that we can get them to add I love having the width and height and I know a lot of people really like to ignore horizontal shot dispersion especially if you're shooting a lot of wind or you know long-range especially with wind you know they like to focus on that vertical dispersion instead so wow that's great to have that information I just wish there was one more line for the extreme spread number so other than that I really love the interface it doesn't take long to get used to it makes a lot of sense the options like none of them are super cryptic it just makes sense one thing I figured out after I had filmed the previous part this show all targets or hide alt or hide unused targets that one there that's for whenever you've got multiple targets connected to your access point so if your range has ten targets and you've got ten systems and they all connect back to a single access point well whenever you connect to the access point along the bottom here would be a list of targets so remember we named our target jr. B so it would be down here and it would say jr. B and then there would be others and I guess that option like maybe once you've selected your target you can you know select that to hide the unused ones and regain that screen space perhaps or at least I think that's it so I think that's all I wanted to complain about so I think I'm gonna reach out to them and see if they'll add this target which is pretty much my standard target that I usually use but something nice and wide would give a lot more room for those you know boxes around each group and all of that stuff because trying to limit yourself to what can be printed on a standard eight-and-a-half by eleven or a4 paper or whatever is a bit of a pain in the butt this right here is standard poster board that at least here in the United States we can buy anywhere any drugstore any Walmart any anything is gonna have poster board and it's 22 inches wide and 28 inches tall so if I chop that into four sections its 22 by 7 so a canvass of 22 by 7 with a horizontal line in the middle four inches between the the edge and and the first dot same thing over here four inches over here and then three and a half inches between each one fits perfect the dots don't really matter you know these are just the normal battle of whom at Caldwell or whoever makes these dots little stickers that doesn't matter just a half inch black dot maybe would be just fine or maybe a one-inch orange with a quarter inch dot in the middle it really doesn't matter but yeah hopefully maybe I can get them to to add this but then again maybe not after I talk crap about their shipping times and stuff hopefully they take that as constructive criticism that's certainly how I mean it like I mentioned earlier it's an easy fix the product exceeds my expectations in every way it's more precise than I dared hope like those groups were really really close I love the fact that you can get replacement parts without some big markup my original plan with my target frame was to mount the sensor hub like on the back of one of the two by fours and then put like a an AR 500 steel plate or something over top of it so I so I couldn't shoot it and I might eventually do that because you know I had a hundred yards I've got that big tree but I have my two hundred yard line I don't have anything protecting it and I would hate to shoot a five hundred dollar sensor hub now one thing to keep in mind I used some metal right like that conduit and I'm drilling driving metal stakes into the ground and stuff if you're going to use this on a public Range they probably won't allow that and on the website the shot marker website they've got some examples of like a portable target that's all wood that might work better I may eventually build a portable set up because now that I've got that like it really opens up a lot of stuff for me like I think I could find some longer range to shoot at but it's always been you know the thought of back and forth to the target or trying to get on target and this could make that really easy so yeah maybe I'll finally find a good place to shoot long-range that 40 feet per second velocity differential between the lab radar and the shop marker was interesting I'm almost inclined to believe shop marker because they do this company does sell a chronograph they call it the to box chronograph that they claim is a better more precise way of measuring velocity and I think it uses similar sensors you know it uses ultrasonic microphones and they claim it's you know extremely precise and repeatable another thing is the it's been a while since I've tested my lab radar against the magneto speed for velocities and I know there's there's always a bit of differential with those two and I can't remember whether the lab radar normally reads high or low I'm about to do that video the lab radar and magneto speed video that I've been promising for a long time so maybe while we're doing that we'll kick up the shop marker as well and compare the values we get from all three I wonder how close it would work I could I put it at ten yards and shoot through it I wonder whether the the muzzle blast would interfere with the microphones I don't have yeah so that doesn't matter this has got so much potential and whether it's this company or another company like there are some amazing things that could be done with these electronic targets that are becoming more affordable well just like okay so I've got mine and Gavin Gear has his why can't we link them up or if my viewers end up having these why can't I do a a Saturday livestream where everybody connects in with their shop markers and we have a little impromptu match I think that would be a lot of fun like 10 years from now I could totally see a market where you know you when you're going to the range on Saturday you hang up your electronic target you get things calibrated and warmed up and then you connect into essentially a Gaming Lobby you know like a it becomes a game you find your buddies to shoot with and share target information and stuff or just friendly friendly matches with strangers over the Internet I think that would be cool or why can't I follow competitive shooting as a spectator like whatever the big f class match is of the year the freaking you know championship of the universe would you watch a live stream of that or would you log in and maybe actually be able to look at different people's targets follow the match maybe they've got a guy on live streaming giving commentary and stuff that's how it is in archery I follow competitive archery and I haven't shot competitive archery in 20 years if you go to Lancaster Archery's YouTube channel like every year they had the the Lancaster archery classic and they do an awesome job filming that and put it in putting it on YouTube and even the outdoor competition there's like a bow junkie media I think is the name of the channel they basically follow around the pros with a camera and do livestream commentary of the matches there's another one called competition archery media so you get what I'm saying like archery is like covered and there are people finding creative ways to cover that sport and if any of that exists in the shooting world I know I'm not aware of it but to be able to do that with big NRA matches or the Camp Perry CMP shoots or the big F class matches whatever this sort of stuff is gonna enable that I think that's the future I want to live in by God so I think I've yapped enough for crying out loud this is gonna be an extremely long video but that's okay like I said this is gonna show up in every video now and every video is gonna be full of comments here over the next six months of you know what is this target crap and what are you shooting so I'll be able to point them back here and they can get ten times more info than they wanted about the shot marker alright folks that's it hope you enjoyed it I'll see you guys next time

Channel: Johnny's Reloading Bench

Views: 44,086

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Id: NH1Oe_DPREI

Length: 61min 34sec (3694 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2019