@Turkeytider - Addressing your 2 posts here based on the 2 posed or implied questions:
1) How has Athlon responded to these results?
2) Can the Athlon work for some shooters as it is?
I'll try to be succinct as possible here:
1)
How has Athlon responded to my results? First off, reiterating, I'm not affiliated with any of these companies. I bought my first Garmin and Athlon units, and I won my LabRadar LX at Ko2M - but would have bought one if I hadn't won it. My "second unit" of each of these brands has been loaned to me either by the companies or their reps, just to help me avoid long-term borrowing units from other shooters and enable improved data capture opportunities (such as the Static vs. Gun Mounted Velocity Test I shared), really just out of good faith collaboration.
Second, and really emphasizing that reiteration, I really won't pretend I'm materially important to anything Athlon is doing, or Garmin or LabRadar. As I approached this comparison test, I reached out to each of these companies and asked if there were any ways I would fuck up and misrepresent the untis, or any ways I could unfairly bias the test, and if there were any specific features they felt made their brand/model stand out. Most companies were interested in discussing the test, but again, I'm just a peckerwood who lives in the hills with too many guns, and all I did was make a few phone calls - the companies just want to support the tribal knowledge of our universe, so they were willing to help out in good faith and loan the demo units.
With that out of the way... Regarding how I see Athlon responding to user feedback, including my own: Specifically, I contacted Athlon because 2 units I had on hand were reading incremental offsets when compared to other chronographs. Athlon offered troubleshooting processes for temporary solutions, and then within a week, I received a text that they were issuing a firmware update the next week which should fix the issue - and it DID improve the occurrence from nearly 100% of sessions down to only 1/3 or 1/4 of sessions. Equally, I had connectivity and sync issues with my 3rd Athlon unit, and their response was again, advice for immediate troubleshooting processes - which did not work - but then after about a month of manually entering hundreds of data points, a firmware update solved that problem. I do know other users are having issues, and I know Athlon is still working on some - it seems the connectivity/sync issues are solved for almost all iOS users, but still not quite ironed out for Android/Samsung phone users, so that's still work in progress. All of that is to say that I have seen firsthand that Athlon is offering CS to productively support user issues, and that they are making incremental firmware updates to their app and to their unit software to improve reliability.
I also acknowledge, as objectively critical as I am of ALL of these units, the Athlon Velocity Pro simply is younger in market and is racing to catch up. LabRadar and Garmin have the luxury of having already survived many of these growing pains because they already have years of head start in this practice - LabRadar had the V1 on the market for a decade before these others, and Garmin has had multiple Radar devices on the market for a few years before the C1, and has had dozens of bluetooth communicating devices on the market for over a decade. So it's reasonable to expect that Athlon would have more CURRENT issues as they are sprinting through their learning curve to catch up - a year or two from now, the expectation of nearly-perfect functional execution is more reasonable than it is today.
2) Can the Athlons work for some users as is? As I mentioned above - We're 7 pages deep into this thread, so I know my post was kind of lost in the depths at this point, but I did acknowledge in this thread, the Athlons can be fruitfully deployed by a great percentage of shooters. Who would be at risk, in my opinion, and how?
--> With the intermittent high/low offset issue: ELR shooters would be sensitive to the ~30fps spread of potential results I've seen. This is roughly +/-0.5% error from truth, so as good or better than any common optical chronograph from history, but still looser than we want. But an ELR shooter would sail above or sink below targets. A PRS shooter can likely honestly be just fine with this error, and a shooter with a careful sense of attention might simply restart their Athlon when they notice a marked high or low result for a known load.
--> Shooters watching closely velocity as a means of tracking barrel life or watching for carbon ring indicators might be tricked by the offset. Again, simply resetting the unit would correct or confirm the change, but this would be an extra step.
--> Someone trying to compare multiple loads spread over multiple days, where +/-0.5% might represent the difference between each load could be mislead into trusting incorrect relative results. Does that difference of 30fps really matter? eh, probably not. But if I'm trying to compare, say, two primers, or two lots of powder, or two different brands of cases, or worst of all, looking at one set of charge weights one day against any of the other parameters on the next day, that intermittent offset issue could bite me in the ass. BUT, if a shooter is sure to shoot both comparative samples on the same day, they'd be just fine.
--> An extension of the latter, but an incredibly small niche, if a shooter is trying to test for temperature sensitivity of their load, the intermittent offset issue could lead to false results in the correlation curve.
I don't think that the higher volatility I've seen with the units (inherent noise between readings of a string) is really of consequence for anyone. Over large sample sets, the SD's (strangely) seem to end up very similar, but when you look at the results as a trendline, the volatility is visibly higher... Inconsequential, overall, maybe I guess a guy with a Garmin could post online that display picture with 5 shots and an ES of 7 but the Athlon might read that same string with an ES of 10, but other than bragging online, that's really an inconsequential difference. It looks ugly to a data hound, but an application/field engineer recognizes noise as noise, and signal as signal.
I also don't think even the guys riding the ragged edge of Power Factors or velocity speed limits could get themselves in hot water, because the maximum offsets I'm seeing are in the 20's fps... Maybe if the absolutely unlikely coincidence of a guy measuring their load velocity at home and reading 20fps LOW then going to a match and being checked by a different Athlon which intermittently measured 20fps HIGH that day, they could swing 40fps and end up above the speed limit, but restarting EITHER unit would bring them both within 20fps of each other, so I really don't see that as a REAL issue.
And again, I do think the offset issue will be resolved by future firmware updates. It has been partially solved already. The volatility is still very tight, set up is fast and easy, nothing downrange, so they're always going to be superior to any optical chronograph, and most folks will find them easier to set up than Magnetospeeds, so ultimately, at sub $300, with a little higher volatility and some quirks compared to the $500 Garmin or LabRadar, it's still a great unit.
Maybe another statement which might mean a lot to folks - I'd rather buy an Athlon than a LabRadar V1 at the same price today.
Spuhr SP-4001C: 34mm Picatinny Mount 0 MOA - 1.18"
