One of the reasons I got the SC300i launch monitor was because of its near-spot-on data points with regards to ball & club speed (more than near-spot-on as it uses Doppler radar) and carry/total yardage info (very accurate compared to GC/Trackman).

That can’t be faked, so I knew that it would be the perfect tool for doing swing research on the range without having to resort to mortgaging my soul to do so.

The only thing I wished it had as an added feature was a shot tracer, because it’s always a nifty thing to show the ball flight for a shot:

I was disappointed when I began to look into shot tracing apps to go along with my portable launch monitor and found from a product review that the most popular and “accurate” shot tracer has a feature to allow one to edit the tracer if it’s not accurate, and the bold/underlining below are my edits:

Even after I learned to use it properly there is still a major issue. The app does not always pick up the shot properly. Watch the short video below and you will see how when it goes wrong it goes very wrong. A few shots were picked up and traced from my feet for some odd reason.

There were a few times I hit a low draw and it said the flight was high and straight. Although you can go manually change the tracer from where it starts, to the flight and where it ends that really defeats the purpose of the app.

If you can manually alter the flight path etc.. then you may as well not have the app trace anything and just let users put whatever ball flight they choose. So remember when you see all those videos of people hitting all these great quality golf shots they are not all real.

Um, yeah… and that’s the best-rated shot tracer app, so I looked for another one.

The V1 Golf Game app apparently has a tracer feature, however when I downloaded the app and registered with V1, I couldn’t for the life of me see any feature on the app itself to trace shots, unless you have to shoot the video first and then add the tracer?

Beats me.  If anyone has a V1 Golf Game app and knows if/how it shows a golf ball tracer, I’d love to hear from you.

There’s no point in using cheap or free apps that don’t reliably trace ball flight and I’m for sure not going to use one that can be fudged in editing for obvious reasons (I don’t like to be accused of fudging my numbers or anything else, so this one is a nonstarter for me), because what is the point?

Meanwhile the search continues for an accurate and non-fudgeable (because the whole point of this endeavor is to back up model performance, not to fake it) shot tracer app.