Considering a new chrony, and reconsidering ...

[big5ifty]

I've been waiting for the new Athlon chrony to make an appearance, which I planned on buying if the reviews were good.

I was looking at the Garmin, when I was ready to buy it the Athlon chrony was announced, so I opted to wait instead.

However, I got to thinking, and now I'm leaning towards the old Labradar. Simply put, the ability of the unit to give an estimated bullet BC, or at least give the data to calculate a bullet BC, is very appealing to me, for the shooting I do.

I have a perfectly good chrony for velocity measurement, and to spend money on another one that does precisely the same thing ... I don't need or want to know the velocity of every shot I take after the initial load development. I chrony for load development only.

Something that can give me, or enable me to calculate bullet BC is actually worth having.

I'm looking around and the old generation labradar can be had relatively cheaply. If the Athlon chrony was becomes available at the same price as a used Labradar mk1, I would prefer the Labradar for my purposes.

The new Labradar can also give BC, but the old one has more reliable data to around 60 meters instead of +-15, and will cost half of what the new model costs.

From the many reviews, the old Labradar suffers from positioning problems, and intermittent activation issues. For my purposes, I shoot prone, so the unit can sit on a tripod just above my line of scope, and there is a recoil activated trigger that can be used to eliminate delayed or missed activation.

There remains the issue that they are made in Canada. For the bullet BC estimate, I'll suffer that.

[223]

Makes a lot of sense.  I see used Labradars going for around R8k. Most likely owners upgrading to the newer, smaller models.

The new models, including the new Athlon expected to retail around R6k, have the advantage of very easy setup.  Just put it down and point it in the general direction of the target, and you can record velocities. The convenience is their biggest selling point.