Labradar Mark 1 - review

[big5ifty]

I managed to find a used unit with a R.A.T. It was used to record one string of 17 shots.

Before I bought it, the first thing I did was try to understand why the unit had a bad rep. There are two main reasons : the unit positioning in relation to the bullet flight path, and the unit not picking up the shot.

In the early versions, the bluetooth app was also heavily critisized. Battery life is known to be terrible using the AA's, so I used an external battery.

To avoid the positioning problem, I made a four legged stand out of aluminium tubing that positions the unit centered above the scope, just in front of the elevation turret. The legs are to the sides, out of the way of the prone position, but narrow enough not to pick up muzzle blast from a brake. I made it out of what bits I had lying around, with an adjustable tripod head that I used to have a small telescope on.

To avoid the shot recognition problem, there is a R.A.T .

The first thing I did was update the firmware to 2.0.0 . It took a bit of time, I had problems with the unit not reading a 32GB SD card. I reformatted the card several times, the unit refused to read it. I remembered that back in the old days of Windows with FAT partitions, 4GB used to be a partition size limit for reliable functioning, so I partitioned the 32GB SD card with a 4GB FAT32 partition, and it worked perfectly.

The bluetooth app works. You can arm / disarm, navigate between shot strings and create new shot strings. The connection to the Android phone does not drop periodically, as some have reported. There was a problem of constant disconnect / reconnect going on, I had started the phone app twice, so it seems each instance was taking turns to connect. Shut down all running apps first and make sure only one instance is started.

Using the stand and the R.A.T attached to the bipod leg, it picked up every shot of the day, and was unaffected by the muzzle blast from the rifle next to me. I had a 6000 mAh battery, and it used 25% over the few hours I had the unit on.

I had no problem "aiming" the unit at the target with the notch in the top.

I wanted this particular unit to get a good estimate of bullet BC during load development, and particularly the BC at my velocity, elevation and atmospheric pressure.

Using the data on the SD card, I can derive a close-enough-to-my-reality BC number for use in ELR, giving confidence that one more variable is well defined.