Initial out-of-the-box impressions. This is based on firmware v1.40.61 and app v1.0.23. Most of this is a review of the app since I haven't taken it out to the range yet.
• Good case. Nothing exotic, but very serviceable and will protect the unit when it's bouncing around in my range bag. Will be on the lookout for a screen protector, though.
• Battery came with ~80% charge, so it was nice not to have to charge it before I could play with it.
• It weighs 4.4 oz according to my postal scale. Garmin says the Xero weighs 4.1 oz.
• The included tripod is nicely solid and weighs 4.5 oz.
• The manual first recommends going to Settings to setup the device, so that's what I did.
••Date formats on the device only support DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY. Would prefer to have YYYY/MM/DD as that can be more easily sorted. It does support 24-hour time, thankfully. The rest of the settings were straight-forward.
•• User manual tells you to download the Athlon Ballistics Lite app, but at least in the Apple App store the app doesn't have "Lite" at the end of the name.
••• The first thing the app asks you to do after you launch it is to sign in, but there's no button or link to create an account and it won't let you submit a username / password that you manually type in. I had to choose the "Sign in with Apple" option to get past this screen. (There's a "Sign in with Google" option, too, but I didn't test that.)
••• Once signed-in you are taken to the Calculator page. At the top are fields for selecting a rifle and bullet profile. Tap the rifle field, then tap "+ New" to create a new rifle profile.
•••• Profile names for bullets and rifles are limited to 15 characters, which is not nearly enough.
•••• For a rifle you input the twist, twist rate, scope details (height, MOA/mil, V&H click values), and then reticle details (FFP/SFP, min/max magnification, and reticle "validitty" (sic) for SFP reticles). There's a reticle library, but understandably it only has details for Athlon reticles.
•••• For a bullet you can specify profile name (again, max 15 chars), length, diameter, weight, G1 or G7 BC, speed, zero distance, and zero offset. Right under the profile name field are four orange buttons for cartridge library, G7 library, G1 library, and pellet library. These save you from having to look up your specific bullet's characteristics, but you still have to give all that data a profile name.
••• Now that you've created your rifle and bullet profiles you can slide the distance, wind speed, and target angle ribbons to your desired values. As you adjust these the large elevation and windage fields at the bottom of the screen update with your current solution.
••• There's also a wind direction circle with a pointer you can drag around to indicate which direction the wind is coming out of. Unfortunately it doesn't snap to any increments, so the O/C amongst us are going to be challenged to get precisely 0°, 25°, 90°, etc.
••• There's a reticle you can tap that takes you to another page showing you where you should hold and what your point of impact will be on a variety of targets (deer, coyote, 10" circle, IPSC, etc.). I don't know that I'd ever have the time to reference this on a moving target, but it's still kinda neat.
••• The chart button takes you to your ballistics chart. In there there's a Settings button where you can show/hide a bunch of different columns of data. Unfortunately the app only displays the chart in portrait view, so you only get 3–4 columns of data visible at a time and you can't set the column order. It'd be nice if you could rotate this into landscape mode and see more columns of data at once.
••• Lastly, there's a weather button that takes you to a weather page where you can tap another button to fill in your local weather. However, it won't automatically fill in your altitude (even though your phone knows that info).
••• To connect the app to the Rangecraft, tap the hamburger menu then select "Connect Device." Tap the "Pair" button at the bottom of the screen. Then in the Rangecraft go to Settings->Connection->Pair Phone. You should get a confirmation PIN and your devices will be connected. If you power off the Rangecraft it looks like you need go back to the Connect Device screen in the Athlon Ballistics app and tap the "Pair" button for the devices to connect again, but you don't have to be in any particular screen on the Rangecraft when you do this.
••• Note also that you'll get a spurious "Please enable and connect to Bluetooth" error message at the bottom of the Connect Device screen in the Athlon Ballistics app after they connect.
So to sum of the out-of-the-box experience, it's a little rough. The paper manual has some errors and is pretty brief. The Athlon Ballistics app also has some errors, odd limitations, and quirks. However, if the YouTube reviews of the chronograph performance are to be believed, the Rangecraft is a pretty solid little chronograph for significantly less than the Xero. Fortunately software can be updated and I think all these little issues can be pretty easily ironed out.
