I have a Labradar chronograph. It is more expensive than previous chronographs I have owned but as I have outlined before it has some major benefits.
There are some some issues with it too. It’s not required, but there is an app for use on your Android or iPhone. The app improved the usability considerably even though it wasn’t the best design and it would disconnect when the phone turned off the screen.
Then my phone had to be replaced. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S21 5G. Name brand, should be good, right? The Labradar will not connect with it. The phone recognizes the chronograph Bluetooth is up and running but cannot make the connection. It turns out many other people are having the same problem with other Android phones and tablets as well as iPhones.
The Android app hasn’t been updated since it was released on June 14, 2018. I have two very cheap older Android phone scheduled to arrive in a day or two and I’m hoping one of them will work.
Another issue is that you have to have the unit pointed at your target such that the bullet stays near to the center of the radar beam. You are supposed to use the notch on the top as a sight:
This is far from the best sight and is marginal at best.
While looking for a solution to the Bluetooth phone application issue I ran across a solution to the sighting issue. Actually, three solutions:
I ordered option three on Saturday afternoon (Christmas day!) and it arrive today just four days later.
It took me less than 25 seconds to install it.
It fits perfectly and solidly. It deserves the average of five stars on the reviews it is getting.
Now if I can just get a phone to run the out of date app and connect to the unit. I think I could reverse engineer the API and write my own app but that is an extreme last resort.
Update: I tried two different phones:
- TracFone Blu View 2 (Android 10 2 GB RAM)
- TracFone BLU View 3 (Android 11 with 3 GB RAM)
The View 2 would not connect. The View 3 would sometimes connect five times in a row. Then it would fail 20 times in a row. I returned both of them and ordered a phone using Android 9 with 1 GB RAM. I have my suspicions that it is a timing problem. It seemed that if I were to reboot the phone then immediately try to connect to the chronograph the odds of connecting were better than 50%. But I didn’t try that enough to have a good sample size. I’m hoping that with not much RAM (and reviews complaining about how slow the phone is) that it may reliably connect to the Chronograph. The phone should arrive late next week. I’ll let you know….
Hi Joe,
If the app has not been updated in some time, the connection issue may be caused by the Android OS changing with newer phones.
In the mobile app arena we found significant behavioral issues when Android OS10 came out, causing us and customers to scramble for available tablets with OS9, until the app could be updated.
So you MAY find that those older phones work fine. It’s likely that their upgrade path is limited to an older Android OS (say OS8 for example) meaning they can’t upgrade and introduce the connection issue.
Jeff B.
@ColdSteel1983, that was my general line of thought too. But I didn’t have actual version numbers to talk about then. I just looked them up.
My old phone, which worked, ran Android 9. My new phone is using 11.
I’m not sure what the cheap phones coming in this weekend are running. I’m hoping one of them works whatever it is running.
Looks like an interesting chrono in any case, and their target cam systems are interesting too.
If their different Vs at different distances are accurate anough, it should be fairly simple to add a BC calculation feature to the on-board display. That’d be handy for some of us crazies who use custom bullet molds, and for long range rifle as well so we can be monitoring the consistency of our BCs. The 100 yard limit might be a problem there though (so bump up the power and/or sensitivity and double the price). As it is we have to set up two chronos to really do it right.
I’m thinking of Hornady (I believe it was) who used radar to discover that their poly tips were deforming in flight due to heat, leading them to refomulate the tip for a more consistent BC. Stuff like that.
Yes. It was Hornady.
Yes, I have written an Windows desktop command line application to compute the BCs from what Labradar calls the Track data. Each track is the velocity and distance measurement of the bullet for a single shot. This data is accessible by pulling the SD card from the chronograph and copying the files to your computer.
My app reads all the tracks, throws out outliers (things get noisy at the end of the range before losing the bullet entirely), and does a best fit to the data for all the shots taken as a whole and reports the BC.
If I were to write my own phone app it would include this feature.
Joe, could you print another such sight for my labradar?
No. I don’t have a 3-D printer. 🙂
You can buy one from the same place I bought mine though. Click on the links where I say I found “three solutions”.