SCATT - Your opinion

Leon08

Out of curiosity, has anyone here ever used any of the SCATT shooter training systems and if so, are they worth the money and is there a demand for them?

Regards,
L

Sparks

Yes; Yes if you need them but most people don't; and Yes, but not because most people need them.

There have been threads on this before here and here.

Leon08

Sparks wrote: »

Yes; Yes if you need them but most people don't; and Yes, but not because most people need them.

There have been threads on this before here and here.

Thanks Sparks. So it is mostly top shooters that use it to reach perfection? And also, if the systems were cheaper would they not be used more, even at moderate to advanced shooter level to work on technique?

It wasn't me!

All electronic trainers give you a graphic representation of what's happening at the target end and the time-scale for it. They don't tell you what's wrong; that you figure out by a combination of observing what's happening and then considering possible causes of the effects you're observing. They're good training tools, but only if you know how to use one to train, rather than as an entertaining videogame. Some, such as the Noptel, allow live fire, with cartridge firearms, so you can observe your recoil trace as well. As to whether they're useful to modest shooters? Well, depends on the above really. They can certainly provide useful information if the individual knows how to interpret it or has a coach who does. The cost is off-putting, but several clubs have them or have access to them, and that's how individual shooters gain access to them as well for the most part.

Sparks

To be honest, if they cost a tenner and everyone had one, I think that everyone's shooting would suffer from it.

The Rika/Noptel/Scatt trainers tell you something very, very specific about the last second or three before the shot and the quarter-second or so afterwards. So for finding a problem with your triggering, they can be useful, and for getting a quantitative measure of your hold, they can also be useful (though frankly that's a reasonably useless number).

What they cannot do is fix your hold, or show you why your hold isn't good, or fix your sight alignment problem or your sight picture problem or your inner position problem or even tell you which of these is a problem. But everyone seems to think they can (and I don't know why to be honest).

Put it this way - if someone behind you can see with the naked eye that your barrel is moving or you are swaying in the last three seconds before the shot? Then an electronic trainer would be worse than useless because it distracts you from fixing the problems that you have to fix. Hell, half the problems people on the firing line in Ireland have, you don't need to even fire a shot to work on:

• Zero position and inner position - you don't need to fire a shot, you don't really even need sights.
• Sight alignment - you don't need to fire and you don't need a target.
• Sight picture - you don't need to fire and you could use a reduced size target in your kitchen rather than being on the range.
• Trigger control - you need to trigger the rifle, yes, but it doesn't need to be loaded or even charged (for an air rifle).

For something like air rifle or 25yd prone, you don't ever even need to be on the range, let alone be strapped into a live-fire noptel trainer.
50m rifle, well, there you have to learn to cope with wind, and that does mean you have to be on a range; but if you can't hold on target and trigger properly, then it wouldn't matter if you had Doppler radar for eyes and could see the wind. And to learn wind, you have to experience it a lot, which means going to many different ranges, so it's a whole other beast than the fundamentals.

MikeD

I'd agree with Sparks on that one. There's not much that you can gather from an electronic trainer that you shouldn't be able to see when looking down the sights. Dry firing and rounds down the barrel are the best training technique really. Along with some exercises as directed by your coach of course and some basic fitness training!

Leon08

Thanks guys, the reason I asked was because I was interested in the technology behind them. They're not awfully complicated or intricate yet they cost a bomb. And since they're not much use except in very specific cases, makes you wonder why. Cheers for the info.

Sparks

Well, they're like any specialist tool really - very good (if not the only option) for specific things; made in low numbers, hence usually expensive; and not much use when not being used for their original design purpose.

Thing is, salesmen love to sell stuff, so instead of finding every high-level shooter who's trained in their shot routine and position over tens of thousands of shots (so that they know how to repeat the same shot time and again so you can extract data from them) and who have a specific problem with triggering or recoil and marketing to just that small subset; they try to sell these things to everyone as some sort of replacement for training time and/or hard graft.

It'd be nice if it worked like that