Flightscope and trackman question

[kermitm]

Hello manzella members

I was recently watching a flightscope fitting and had a few questions. The player was hitting the ball on a range where the ball was landing in a low area ( behind a set of mounds). Because of the layout of the range, you could not see where the ball landed or how far it rolled. The flightscope was still giving readings and I was wondering how this is possible? If I can't see the ball land due to a low are how can the radar track the ball? The other thing that was weird was the smash factor would get up to 1.51 every once in a while. The fitting was done with range balls and I thought the max was around 1.49. Thanks for your help. Kermitm

 

[Erik_K]

I want to say that both Flightscope and Trackman follow the ball in real time. Thus if the Radar can 'see' the ball, the displayed flight is perhaps the real deal.

That's a good question as to how it can compute roll and distance if the ball drops below the horizon and Radar can't follow the ball. If I had to guess, there's some internal computations taking place based on speed, spin, etc that enables an extrapolation on the data that it already took.

Erik

 

[mgranato]

Once the ball in well into its descent, the radar doesn't need to "see" it land to provide extremely accurate numbers, and the radar typically doesn't use the data from the very tail end of the flight. Roll out is always calculated based on the flight params and settings.

Smash can be "tricked" above 1.5 because not all areas on the face are traveling the same speed or produce the same ball speed.

 

[Frans@France]

The radar can not look lower then the horizon and even very close to the ground there are issues. So roll is calculated and when the range has a "drop" you will only see the carry till the ball crosses the horizon. It's called the flat carry

 

[noobie]

Radar based devices typically state that a ball needs to travel about 10-15 feet in the air in order to calculate a realistic ball flight. That means that the ball flight can be calculated based on initial ball flight data. They probably have equations that model the ball flight and all you need to do is to input a few initial parameters.

 

[dannyc]

if it is downhill, the radar will stop measuring when the ball breaks the horizontal plane (same level as device).

if it is uphill, the radar will calculate to the horizontal plane.