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Arccos and Garmin irregularities.

Luchnia

Luchnia

You will never conquer golf.
Joined
Jan 8, 2020
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Location
Virginia
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I am fairly consistent in knowing my yardages and overall stats. My buddy has Arccoss with sensors and I have Garmin S20 watch (I don't have individual club sensors).

I have been watching our stats for a while and I find these devices to be more inconsistent than I had expected them to be. They give you an idea, but you really have to check behind them if you want correct info. I have seen shots added, missed, distance issues, and ball locations to be off.

For instance the last round I played I came home and synced my device to upload the data. My device showed the longest drive at 217 yards which I knew was incorrect. Sometimes it is just simple math. One hole was 280 yards and the ball landed around 20 yards from the pin. 20 from 280, does not equal 217.

My buddy is often commenting about how the Arccoss missed shots, and shows some of his drives at around 350+ Heck one day according to Arccoss he hit a drive 395 LOL He is lucky if he can get 200 once in a rare while. You kind of get used to the once in a while misread.

Too often he simply relies on the info the device gives him as he does not verify stats like I do. I watch other guys with these devices and some of them seem to agree with most everything the device shows. The devices are great to give you general information and letting you know the general area you hit, yet don't put too much into it.

I like to know more precisely what I am doing out on the course so I know what I need to work on to improve my game. I don't keep stats all the time, but I do try to keep stats for areas I know I need improvement. I really like and enjoy the technology and info the devices provide, but have to use caution.

Do those of you that use the technology check behind it? I go in and update my Garmin stats and make corrections, yet it is time consuming. The point is don't put too much trust in the accuracy of these type of devices.
 
After every round I go back into Arccos and adjust pin locations, putts, where my first putt was from, etc.

I don't get missed shots very often - maybe once every 20 rounds. I do get false positives some if I'm standing well away from my ball taking a practice swing. So I make those edits as well.

I figure if I'm going to make data-driven decisions, the underlying data needs to be reliable. Otherwise it's just guessing.

That said, I don't find the numbers themselves to be inaccurate as long as I'm cleaning it up post round.
 
I wonder if your course is in some sort of GPS dead zone or thin zone with poor coverage. I've had great results with Arccos and found it to be very accurate and capture 95% of my shots correctly.
 
Jmk202 said:
I wonder if your course is in some sort of GPS dead zone or thin zone with poor coverage. I've had great results with Arccos and found it to be very accurate and capture 95% of my shots correctly.
Click to expand...
Good point. We play a variety of different courses in about a 50 mile radius. I will look into this as we play more and see if the issues are more in certain areas the courses are in.
 
I double check each arccos round shortly after to correct the few that it misses and to add penalty shots (sadly). Arccos is quite good these days for me and the corrections have historically been minimal but it will occasionally miss a shot or a few putts.
 
Luchnia said:
I am fairly consistent in knowing my yardages and overall stats. My buddy has Arccoss with sensors and I have Garmin S20 watch (I don't have individual club sensors).

I have been watching our stats for a while and I find these devices to be more inconsistent than I had expected them to be. They give you an idea, but you really have to check behind them if you want correct info. I have seen shots added, missed, distance issues, and ball locations to be off.

For instance the last round I played I came home and synced my device to upload the data. My device showed the longest drive at 217 yards which I knew was incorrect. Sometimes it is just simple math. One hole was 280 yards and the ball landed around 20 yards from the pin. 20 from 280, does not equal 217.

My buddy is often commenting about how the Arccoss missed shots, and shows some of his drives at around 350+ Heck one day according to Arccoss he hit a drive 395 LOL He is lucky if he can get 200 once in a rare while. You kind of get used to the once in a while misread.

Too often he simply relies on the info the device gives him as he does not verify stats like I do. I watch other guys with these devices and some of them seem to agree with most everything the device shows. The devices are great to give you general information and letting you know the general area you hit, yet don't put too much into it.

I like to know more precisely what I am doing out on the course so I know what I need to work on to improve my game. I don't keep stats all the time, but I do try to keep stats for areas I know I need improvement. I really like and enjoy the technology and info the devices provide, but have to use caution.

Do those of you that use the technology check behind it? I go in and update my Garmin stats and make corrections, yet it is time consuming. The point is don't put too much trust in the accuracy of these type of devices.
Click to expand...

Until recently, I have had a very smooth experience with Arccos and I have used it for several years now. Recently, it has been adding putts, which is not a big deal to correct. In addition, it seems like it is giving me wrong yardages on shots, but I may be wrong and, honestly, I am not sure how it could since it merely plots points on a gps grid.

I am guessing that the 395 yard drive you describe is simply Arccos not having registered the second shot. I have seen this happen a few times in three years of using it. The systems are not perfect to be sure, but they are helpful and fun, at least for me.
 
I don't get them every round but I correct any inconsistencies I do find when I plug the Garmin Approach S60 into the laptop after the round. Sometimes I know it missed shot(s) ahead of time (aka your buddy's 395 yard bomb - or I checked the watch when I got to my drive and no shot distance was displayed) but I wait until I'm home to correct on bigger screen.

I figured out exactly why my watch sometimes misses a shot, might apply to you and your friend? I had always started my swing from a moving start. Mini waggles to the ball, feet and weight shuffling, to preview my perceived correct path and get comfortable. I'd go directly into my backswing from one of those waggles without a pause. I was completely unaware I did this until a THP buddy posted video of one of my swings here several years ago. Well my Garmin watch doesn't record a swing unless I come to a pause before I start back, a half second is more than enough. Silver lining is I'm starting from a more consistent setup now but developing a new swing trigger after all these years wasn't easy. Whenever my watch misses a shot now, I know I relapsed and need to slow down and come to a stop before I go.
 
I check every round. Most often the only thing I change is adding/subtracting putts. Occasionally, there are drives that show in the rough that were in fairway. The one thing that I don’t do well enough is change the first putt distance. On one putts, I am pretty good at editing that so that it doesn’t show a number of 20’ one-putts when there were actually tap-ins
 
I go back in for sure and double check after marking pin and putt locations. I want to use the data to improve so I take the time. I’ve only been using Arccos for a month but I find it to be accurate based on my historical data using SwingU.
 
oumagic said:
I check every round. Most often the only thing I change is adding/subtracting putts. Occasionally, there are drives that show in the rough that were in fairway. The one thing that I don’t do well enough is change the first putt distance. On one putts, I am pretty good at editing that so that it doesn’t show a number of 20’ one-putts when there were actually tap-ins
Click to expand...
That was my experience as well. I didn't really understand how to change putts other than plus or minus. But when I finally figured out how to change the distances of that first putt, the handicap it had showing for putting went down in a hurry. Of course then the approach handicap went up because my distance to the pin was bad!
 
Luchnia said:
I am fairly consistent in knowing my yardages and overall stats. My buddy has Arccoss with sensors and I have Garmin S20 watch (I don't have individual club sensors).

I have been watching our stats for a while and I find these devices to be more inconsistent than I had expected them to be. They give you an idea, but you really have to check behind them if you want correct info. I have seen shots added, missed, distance issues, and ball locations to be off.

For instance the last round I played I came home and synced my device to upload the data. My device showed the longest drive at 217 yards which I knew was incorrect. Sometimes it is just simple math. One hole was 280 yards and the ball landed around 20 yards from the pin. 20 from 280, does not equal 217.

My buddy is often commenting about how the Arccoss missed shots, and shows some of his drives at around 350+ Heck one day according to Arccoss he hit a drive 395 LOL He is lucky if he can get 200 once in a rare while. You kind of get used to the once in a while misread.

Too often he simply relies on the info the device gives him as he does not verify stats like I do. I watch other guys with these devices and some of them seem to agree with most everything the device shows. The devices are great to give you general information and letting you know the general area you hit, yet don't put too much into it.

I like to know more precisely what I am doing out on the course so I know what I need to work on to improve my game. I don't keep stats all the time, but I do try to keep stats for areas I know I need improvement. I really like and enjoy the technology and info the devices provide, but have to use caution.

Do those of you that use the technology check behind it? I go in and update my Garmin stats and make corrections, yet it is time consuming. The point is don't put too much trust in the accuracy of these type of devices.
Click to expand...

I use Arccos and a laser rangefinder, and one of the guys I play with uses a GolfBuddy. Overall I've found that they more or less all agree on distances, and obviously the rangefinder is best since GPS doesn't know precisely where the pin is. For the others, at the core it's just generic GPS data and since GPS can typically be off anywhere from 10 to 30 feet you'll always get some discrepancies but this is a GPS issue not a Garmin or Arccos issue. And like others have said, Arccos is awesome but you do have to go in and make sure each round is accurate and some edits will need to be made. For me that's maybe 2 minutes after each round at the most. Curious about one thing though - when you say "One hole was 280 yards and the ball landed around 20 yards from the pin" how did you determine that the hole was 280 yards, or that you were 20 yards from the pin? In all of my experience, the GPS apps are far more truthful than any scorecards or signage on the course so unless you're measuring with a rangefinder, which mine won't do that far away, GPS is the most accuracy you'll likely ever get. When I've found myself in similar situations where something doesn't seem right, it was never the GPS or rangefinder that was mistaken.

On a related note, where a rangefinder has the most value is on the practice range, not the course. All those yardage signs when you practice are vague approximations at best and straight up wrong at worst. If you're not scoping the markers when you go to the range you truly have no idea how far you hit a club, and once you do you might be surprised at how far you are off. I think all of these things play a factor in why so many think they drive the ball 300 yards but when actually measured it's closer to 240. I'd also add that once you know how far you truly hit a club it makes finding balls a whole lot easier. For example, I know I hit my drive around 250 every single time, so if I hit one in the rough on a hole that's 450, I know all I have to do is go until I'm around 200 from the green and then look left and right and my ball will be right there somewhere. One guy I play with drives the ball almost identically to me (250) and half the time I'll catch him looking for his ball 300 yards out (or 200) and then wondering why his ball disappeared. Then I'll go find his ball using this same method and he wonders how in the world his ball ever got there ;)
 
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