It offers no automatic calibration, but a pair of sliders always accessible at the main screen provide you with access to those settings. For starters, it functions as a shot timer. The interface isn’t super-intuitive, but after you figure out what everything does, pretty much all the features are useful and easy to adjust. Splits shares IST’s basic presentation but has a lot more features. Splits is an excellent, fully-featured, easy-to-use shot timer program. Between these issues and the total absence of record keeping, I’d duck IST in live-fire. You have to manually calibrate it, then differentiate the echoes from the actual shots yourself or deal with poor shot registration. Ultimately, I find the IST to be a great no-frills dry fire aid but questionable in live fire. Unfortunately, given its difficulty differentiating gunfire, ambient noises, and echoes, the Virginia scoring count feature is basically worthless. Even I have better splits than that sometimes, so I can’t call this success. But at that level of sensitivity, there was no way to prevent echoes from registering without raising the echo delay to the full half-second. When I set up the threshold manually, I found a setting near 200 worked well for pistol fire and would at least register every shot. After a good deal of this failure, I tried some other tricks like positioning the phone differently so the mic would be elsewhere - to no avail. In most magazines while testing it with the automatic calibration, it would register just under half of all shots. The automatic calibration never worked well it usually set its threshold setting to about 255, where it would consistently fail to pick up gunfire. In live fire, things fell apart both indoors and outside. Combined with it’s simple and clean interface, and IST gets a big thumbs-up for a dry fire tool. The Par Time feature is very useful for testing yourself on common dry-fire drills. It picks up the click of your gun well and provides accurate times. A quick auto-calibration and you should be good to go. You can also set your preferred scoring method of Comstock, Virginia, and Par Time. For now, you can use it as a shot timer with just essentials you can change its sensitivity to noise, adjust the start beep’s time delay and randomization, and an echo delay (preventing the time from picking up echoes as shots). All three promise to be available in the next version. After start up, you’re met with a simple timer screen, start button, options, calibration, and three blanked out features. IPSC Shot Timer’s interface is clean, with unobtrusive ads, and minimalist.Īn extremely small program, IPSC Shot Timer (IST) is a no-frills affair. All the apps were tested at the same ranges on the same days, with the phone resting on the bench in front of and below the handgun with the microphone pointed towards the shooter. I also tested all three with a Smith & Wesson Model 10 in dry-fire. I used a CZ-75B with handloaded Power Factor 130 9mm ammo in all live fire, and the same pistol for dry fire. We’ll go over each one-by-one discussing features and performance before a final comparison.įor reference, I tested all three apps using the same gun, ammo, and conditions. I tested these apps as tools for use in dry fire training, as well as for use in live-fire exercises indoors and outdoors. All three are free, but just because something is free doesn’t make it worth your time. Towards that end, I’ll be reviewing the three highest-rated shot timer apps on the Google Play store as of writing: IPSC Shot Timer, Splits, and PS Timer Lite. I initially decided to try these apps out as I wanted a shot timer for dry fire, but I figured I might as well compare them to a dedicated shot timer as well, in an effort to see if they could produce good results for considerable savings. Fortunately, today most people are carrying a mobile phone that can also function as a shot timer. But not everyone is interested in spending money on a niche tool. They’re a wonderful tool for all kinds of shooters and you get a lot of value out of a one-time investment. I wrote an article some time ago espousing the benefits of owning a shot timer and I stand behind that sentiment. The CZ pistol and Smith & Wesson revolver used for testing.
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