New Chrono: Garmin Xero C1

[lazyengineer]

Another question is, how forgiving is the aiming of this Garmin compared with the Labrar. This is for when it's sitting on the tripod. You can lose the first couple of shots with the Labradar if you're not careful with the aiming. And Labradar's aiming notch on top is pretty average for such a narrow beam. I'm hoping the emission beam on the Garmin is more forgiving.

I like how this Garmin is small enough to mount on the handguard somewhere, but does not have to be fixed to the barrel like the Magnetospeed (harmonics). That way you can get velocities while shifting around between multiple targets, like a steel gong session. Hopefully the recoil of larger calibres are not going to turn it into a salt shaker.

I can't get over how small it is.

The size improvement is pretty neat. It's been close to a decade since LabRadar came out (2015). LabRadar is very obviously a home-job hobbyist cottage industry rig. It didn't have anywhere close to the latest Generation industrial accessible electronics and such in it circa 2015. Worse, LabRadar has done nothing to update their product over the near decade since launch. They mostly just walked away and kept Skippy on the manufacturing line churning out the same 2015 era units. They even downgraded it for a while eliminating bluetooth feature for a couple years. While Garmin is an established leading technology company with access to the latest tech's and will have people with titles like "Chip Fab Foundry Relationship Manager" and such; and a supply-chain relationship with all the other component suppliers, already in place. So it's not so surprising the Garmin unit is so much more modern. And at the same price-point, I see no reason not to buy this over a LabRadar. That's what I'd do, if I didn't already have a LabRadar. I really don't know why Garmin bothered, since they'll only sell a few thousand units a year - my guess is they have a shooter in their tech group. And that alone, gives serious cool-points to Garmin, and something I'll remember. LabRadar's customer service / warrantee group is also cottage-industry level, which is to say when you call and ask for help, the first thing they do is send you a substantial cost-estimate for the shipping and open-ended "parts and labor" aspects. Whereas Garmin will just throw it away and send you another one that the robot's cranked out.

Apparently it doesn't give the user multple tracks like LabRadar does, so you won't be able to back-calculate Ballistic Coefficients (BC)'s, like you can with LabRadar. Which I've found fun to play around with, but really, an activity-trap because the quality of those calculated BC was always just terrible. The span of bullet flight it tracks is too short, and the noise level is just too high to get a trustworthy BC out of a LabRadar, has been my experience at least.

Get it! And write a review. I'm excited, and if my LabRadar breaks (again), I'm just going to dump it and get on of these Garmin's.