I'll make this short: I am a huge fan of all the claimed benefits of electronic targets but they have to be reliable and as of right now they obviously aren't.
I'd accept that were you to say "
the targets I am familiar with" as a preamble to your view on reliability.
You see, I've presided over three consecutive years of State championships on our Hextas and I have yet to come across a circumstance where their
reliability was in question. In every case where a shooter
"lost" a shot we have been able to demonstrate either that he had crossfired (the majority), missed a serious condition change, or forgot to come up/down from the last distance. Crossfires definitely are more prevalent on ETs and it seems to be for two reasons. Firstly, the need to check the fall of the shot at a device at the firing point & not downrange, coupled with the lack of a spotter to identify
your target has contributed to that issue, I'm sure. The second reason for them being
identified is that if shooter A cops an unwelcome extra shot from shooter B on his target, our domestic rules require that it be discounted from the score by a range officer, whereas in the past, shooter & scorers would agree it was a foreigner & proceed without broadcasting the bad news.
Yes, there are some whose parents are yet to have formed a permanent relationship. In any case, as I've mentioned earlier, the log for the system can be reviewed after the event and a call confirmed if it came to that. Additionally, our ET crew can immediately review the shot status of a number of adjacent targets by interrogating the CPU from a spare monitor confirm shot count on each.
The issue of the message
Cannot discriminate shot can occasionally occur and as it happens at the longer distances, we suspect that it usually occurs when a single bullet has an unstable flight because it's underpowered for the distance or is marginally stabilised. Whatever the case, a shooter automatically gets an immediate reshoot. Of interest though, we seldom get more than an occasional shot from any given shooter and never have experienced a circumstance where a bunch of these occurred one after the other.
Cannot discriminate shot probably hit frame, automatically translates as hit frame - miss.
In blustery conditions, we
occasionally get a delayed propagation of the shot value on the shooter's monitor and/or the scorer's PC & this might be confused with a miss in the first instance. We have a
take it slowly procedure to discriminate between a miss & a slow propagation - if it's not immediately identified as a crossfire.
In our events, results are taken from the Hexta streaming results at the competition in the first instance, firstly because it's quicker and secondly because it permits the results to be checked for unexpected detail, for example, if a shooter has an extra shot for that detail. Simultaneously, the physical scorecards are tabulated for a sanity check.
The essence of our success though is for these main reasons:
- We learn, learn learn about our equipment.
- We maintain it to a base level after every weekend club shoot
- We provide Hexta with an error log and take their advice on what adjustments are needed for optimal performance
- We provide daily error log interrogation and necessary repair an adjustment each day during an event.
Incidentally, I've also run three consecutive smaller championship on Kongsberg targets and although they have certain limitations due to when they were designed, I've found them to be adequately reliable because of the level of maintenance given to them, albeit they lack some of the bells & whistles of the Hexta.
