Garmin Approach R10 Portable Golf Launch Monitor

[tezzlacoil]

Just played a round with a guy who works for golfbox. Said the first 45 units they got were just sent out. Garmin hasn't said when the next batch will be sent. He said garmin keep changing the dates so they've given up taking anymore orders or trying to lock in dates as they can't trust it and also they've got more than 200+ preorders still waiting to be fulfilled...

[rlefig]

Budget golf and worldwide golf seems to have these units. I was tired of waiting from Play better and ordered from these two stores and both were ready to ship. worlwide golf shipped first so I cancelled budget.

 

Supposed to be here on Tuesday. Need to work on garage set up. Will set up mounted TV as well. Anybody know how much cold an LCD tv can take? I am in MA.

 

Thanks

[North54]

57 minutes ago, dpvu said:

 

Most of the problems people are having are into a net. I've still had relatively good numbers indoors into a net with the exception of driver being 10-15 yards short. I think Garmin over-promised by saying only 8 feet to the net was required. I have about 10-11 in my garage and the test I did with GC Hawk was about 11-12. Calibration may help for those that are having a problem with launch angles. All you need for a good distance is speed, launch angle, spin and spin axis. We know spin is going to be what it is with this but speed has been good for me so perhaps a way to calibrate the launch angle will really dial it in.  

 

 

Here's the same plot with horizontal deviation added. It's "generally okay". The scale can be a bit deceiving as a point "close" to the line could still easily be 10-15 yards deviation different so those thinking about this unit have to decide if that's something they're willing to accept.

 

The graphs are great info and a nice visual.  Tested mine at a range that had callaway balls and everything seemed quite accurate including distances and ball flight as shown on the app.

 

Would be interesting to see other graphs of your study such as Aoa and club path.

 

Thanks for the graphs.

[Oh Hi Carl]

48 minutes ago, rlefig said:

Budget golf and worldwide golf seems to have these units. I was tired of waiting from Play better and ordered from these two stores and both were ready to ship. worlwide golf shipped first so I cancelled budget.

 

Supposed to be here on Tuesday. Need to work on garage set up. Will set up mounted TV as well. Anybody know how much cold an LCD tv can take? I am in MA.

 

Thanks

I built a screen porch a few years ago.  My builder has a screen porch and he assured us that his TVs have been fine outside on his porch year round in Maryland.  He said he called Sony and they said that modern TVs aren't affected by cold.   

[Oh Hi Carl]

When I do the firmware upgrade to 3.4 using Garmin Express, can I do that on a Windows PC?  Thanks

[JCisME]

33 minutes ago, Oh Hi Carl said:

When I do the firmware upgrade to 3.4 using Garmin Express, can I do that on a Windows PC?  Thanks

Yes. I just completed mine.

[Oh Hi Carl]

35 minutes ago, JCisME said:

Yes. I just completed mine.

Thank you!

[jagmanjoe]

1 hour ago, JCisME said:

Yes. I just completed mine.

I am not understanding as every time I go on the Garmin Express site, it shows my R10 is up to date with v 3.3.  Am I missing something since I just checked a few minutes ago and still shows the same.  No mention of a version 3.4 for me.

Edited September 4, 2021 by jagmanjoe
added last line

[Oh Hi Carl]

How do you connect a second device? I connected my phone and that was easy because the light turns blue and it goes into pairing mode the first time you turn it on. What about when you then want to pair your ipad? The manual doesn’t say how to get it back into pairing mode. Isn’t that an obvious thing to address in the manual? 

[JCisME]

3 hours ago, jagmanjoe said:

I am not understanding as every time I go on the Garmin Express site, it shows my R10 is up to date with v 3.3.  Am I missing something since I just checked a few minutes ago and still shows the same.  No mention of a version 3.4 for me.

That's strange. Mine showed 3.4

[JCisME]

Just got back from the range and my evaluation is that it did very well with my irons. Right to left had some deviations in how far right/left, but left was always left and right was right. Distances were spot on with 7-sw. My 4h and driver shots were way short. 4h was roughly 20 yds short and driver was between 20-50 yds short. I ran out of balls before I could hit 3w or 5/6 irons. I am happy overall with the unit, I just hope they can fix the driver distance issue. I bought this mainly to work on my irons so the short comings that I found are acceptable to me.

[dpvu]

11 hours ago, North54 said:

The graphs are great info and a nice visual.  Tested mine at a range that had callaway balls and everything seemed quite accurate including distances and ball flight as shown on the app.

 

Would be interesting to see other graphs of your study such as Aoa and club path.

 

Thanks for the graphs.

 

Unfortunately none of the places I've been able to compare to report the club data. I'd love to be able to get some data on that. From "feel" I think it's similar to spin where if you hit 50 shots and looked at them all you'd generally have an okay match but any given shot could be off a decent amount. I think of it as a "bonus" to the ball data being provided.

[aaronpoling]

8 hours ago, Oh Hi Carl said:

How do you connect a second device? I connected my phone and that was easy because the light turns blue and it goes into pairing mode the first time you turn it on. What about when you then want to pair your ipad? The manual doesn’t say how to get it back into pairing mode. Isn’t that an obvious thing to address in the manual? 

You have to press the button again for it to flash Blue again and enter pairing mode.

I connected both my iPad and iPhone.

[Oh Hi Carl]

23 minutes ago, aaronpoling said:

You have to press the button again for it to flash Blue again and enter pairing mode.

I connected both my iPad and iPhone.

Thanks, I finally got it to work.  It was only going blue for a nanosecond and my ipad wasn't picking it up.  

 

E6 can only be on one device, right? 

[dpvu]

8 hours ago, Oh Hi Carl said:

Thanks, I finally got it to work.  It was only going blue for a nanosecond and my ipad wasn't picking it up.  

 

E6 can only be on one device, right? 

Correct. The license binds to a device and you can unbind it to assign to another but I don't know if there's a limit to that per year or something.

[Murdock]

22 hours ago, jagmanjoe said:

I am not understanding as every time I go on the Garmin Express site, it shows my R10 is up to date with v 3.3.  Am I missing something since I just checked a few minutes ago and still shows the same.  No mention of a version 3.4 for me.

 

Same here, I've checked it multiple times and it never gives me the option to upgrade to 3.4

[vsabre]

1 hour ago, Murdock said:

 

Same here, I've checked it multiple times and it never gives me the option to upgrade to 3.4

Same here, still on 3.3. Figure it will come when it comes. No real issues on 3.3 right now...

[Oh Hi Carl]

Mt thoughts after using it for 5 days:

 

1.  Distances into my outdoor net suck.  About 20% short.  

 

2.  Distances at range are quite good.  Usually about a +/- 5 yard variability on balls that land within a yard or two of each other (a 150 yard shot), but I can live with it.

 

3.  About 25% of the courses I have tried to play on HTH won't download.  That's pretty poor for a company of Garmin's reputation for reliability.  

 

4.  I love that I can film my swings so easily.  That's a big bonus for me that hasn't been mentioned much. 

 

5. As for E6, I love that we get the 5 free courses.  The graphics are really cool except that the numbers on the screen are tiny.  I have to walk over to the ipad after each shot to see how many yards I have left to the hole.  Is there any reason they make it like trying to read the bottom row of letters on the eye test?  

 

6.  I'm on version 3.3.  Haven't been given an option on Garmin Express to update to 3.4.

 

Overall, pretty good.  I'm hoping a firmware update will fix the distance measurements into a net and that Garmin figures out how to fix the downloading issue on HTH.    

Edited September 6, 2021 by Oh Hi Carl

[blues72]

Received my R10 over the weekend and I’m definitely enjoying it.  I did notice the low distances so I played around in E6 with elevations to correct the distance gap.  I used my prgr which I trust a lot to compare to.  Ended up at a custom elevation in E6 of 8000 ft!  This had my mid irons pretty spot on but would over correct for driver by about twenty yards on some well struck shots.  The nice thing is you can use these elevations on their practice range as well to correct for the distance issue.

 

Thought some of you may find this info useful.

[Ukfan323]

I've had mine for a few days and put in a couple garage sessions and one on the range. My garage setup is 10 ft ball to screen, about 10ft ceiling height (pictured showing garmin through jpad airplay onto a projector with 4:3 aspect ratio).

 

Garmin must be pulling their hair out wirh how all over the place the reviews are. I think a lot of is that most people are buying this as their first launch monitor and that is contributing to all kinds of goofy setups and indoor swing syndrome (like myself). There's a pic on the fb page with someone literally 2 feet from the net asking what was wrong wrong his setup, and who knows the setups of other folks getting bad results. Another person on garmin forum saying they are getting bad distances indoors and are only 5-6 ft from net. 

 

Bottom line for me, once I made a more conscious effort to correct my indoor swing, my distances were much better and within expected. I haven't hit driver indoor yet but on the range it was withing 10-15 yds. 

 

There are soo many variables here between range elevations, indoor swing, first time launch monitor users, mats, net distances, etc, that I don't think you can take individual reviews as the end all. You need to try it yourself, work through some troubleshooting, and in the end I believe garmin has made a solid product for the right person, and it will get better over the coming months like any product that gets updates. 

[rlefig]

Good to hear, mine is arriving today. I wont have time to use it as I just re-did my garage over and everything is a mess. But I hope to use it by Friday

[Oh Hi Carl]

I got a kick out of the photo of the guy standing on his mat two feet from the net asking what’s wrong.  Despite that photo, many people with the distance problem into a net have carefully read all recommendations and tried everything. 
 

The course downloading problem isn’t a user error. Garmin needs to fix that asap. 

Edited September 7, 2021 by Oh Hi Carl

[AlpineGolf]

5 hours ago, Ukfan323 said:

I've had mine for a few days and put in a couple garage sessions and one on the range. My garage setup is 10 ft ball to screen, about 10ft ceiling height (pictured showing garmin through jpad airplay onto a projector with 4:3 aspect ratio).

 

Garmin must be pulling their hair out wirh how all over the place the reviews are. I think a lot of is that most people are buying this as their first launch monitor and that is contributing to all kinds of goofy setups and indoor swing syndrome (like myself). There's a pic on the fb page with someone literally 2 feet from the net asking what was wrong wrong his setup, and who knows the setups of other folks getting bad results. Another person on garmin forum saying they are getting bad distances indoors and are only 5-6 ft from net. 

 

Bottom line for me, once I made a more conscious effort to correct my indoor swing, my distances were much better and within expected. I haven't hit driver indoor yet but on the range it was withing 10-15 yds. 

 

There are soo many variables here between range elevations, indoor swing, first time launch monitor users, mats, net distances, etc, that I don't think you can take individual reviews as the end all. You need to try it yourself, work through some troubleshooting, and in the end I believe garmin has made a solid product for the right person, and it will get better over the coming months like any product that gets updates. 

 

Agreed. I received mine end of last week and tried it first during one indoor session. I got about 10ft from mat to impact screen but only have c. 8.5ft ceiling height, which is why I cannot hit any long irons or woods and definitely suffer from indoor swing syndrome. Indoor carry distances were generally 30%+ short unfortunately. Some of this is most likely caused by the indoor swing syndrome, but the device is definitely not great even with about 10ft of ball flight (more then the recommended minimum). 

 

I took the R10 to the range on Saturday and tested it against the permanently installed Trackman (special range system that only captures ball data; very accurate). As I could not log in with my personal profile, I had to take pictures of what Trackman measured. You can find the full comparison in the flickr album. For each shot I tried to post first the R10 screenshots followed by the Trackman photo for each shot (7i, 3w, D, 60w). Note that I had to hit normal range balls and all distances are measured in meters. 

 

Garmin R10 vs. Trackman (range session)

 

Carry distances were pretty accurate most of the time, however, the issues about shot shapes became quite apparent with my natural draw tendency and some shapes were just totally off. I hope Garmin can fix some of the indoor issues over time but I am generally quite satisfied with the R10 and it is definitely good value for money. 

 

 

Edited September 7, 2021 by AlpineGolf

[stanjl50]

On 9/6/2021 at 5:18 PM, Oh Hi Carl said:

 

 

3.  About 25% of the courses I have tried to play on HTH won't download.  That's pretty poor for a company of Garmin's reputation for reliability.  

 

 

I don't remember anyone else discussing problems with downloading hth courses. Is this a general problem for many with the device or not?

[Oh Hi Carl]

Just now, stanjl50 said:

I don't remember anyone else discussing problems with downloading hth courses. Is this a general problem for many with the device or not?

There’s a thread on the Garmin support forums where a bunch of people have complained about not being able to download courses on HTH. 

[Sam007]

Got mine yesterday from the local club pro shop that was the local dealer for Garmin in Finland. Took it out of the box to the local Top Tracer range. As mentioned here before it was very easy to get running. Compared the results to the accurate optical Top Tracer. The distances were very accurate in 2-3 meters typically when using mid irons and some hybrids. The direction was not so exact, but in 5-10 meters in direct shots. When adding side spin to shots the error increased depending the spin and direction but was not enormous. The video feature was useful and playing local course at the local range fun. For the price I was satisfied so far. I am interested to see the results at my backyard net where I can compare it to some other small radar.

[stanjl50]

On 9/8/2021 at 10:56 AM, Oh Hi Carl said:

There’s a thread on the Garmin support forums where a bunch of people have complained about not being able to download courses on HTH. 

Either there are some courses that are not available to everyone or there are some R10s with download issues, or some combination. If you tell this group which course you can't download others here with R10s can see if they can download the course, to answer the first possibility that maybe some courses are just not available. This would let you know if it is your R10 or not. Presumably Garmin knows what the answer is but they don't seem to have very many people on product support.

[Oh Hi Carl]

21 minutes ago, stanjl50 said:

Either there are some courses that are not available to everyone or there are some R10s with download issues, or some combination. If you tell this group which course you can't download others here with R10s can see if they can download the course, to answer the first possibility that maybe some courses are just not available. This would let you know if it is your R10 or not. Presumably Garmin knows what the answer is but they don't seem to have very many people on product support.

That's a fine idea, Stan!  Please try to download Edgartown Golf Club (MA) or Ombersley GC (UK).  

[stanjl50]

2 hours ago, Oh Hi Carl said:

That's a fine idea, Stan!  Please try to download Edgartown Golf Club (MA) or Ombersley GC (UK).  

I would be happy to do so but my R10, ordered from Dicks on Sept 1 to be delivered by FedEx on Sept 3rd, has been inching its way across the US by truck  and I suspect that it won't arrive until next week, if ever.

[whumber]

4 hours ago, Oh Hi Carl said:

That's a fine idea, Stan!  Please try to download Edgartown Golf Club (MA) or Ombersley GC (UK).  

Course download fails for me with both of those.

Edited September 10, 2021 by whumber