Scatt Trainer

After the other night's Scatt presentation I am incredibly intrigued. But I was hoping to get some first hand opinions before shelling out the money. If you've used one for pistol, mainly for the bullseye discipline, what are your thoughts and experiences? Would really appreciate your opinions. Ty.

Although I haven't used the Scatt any appreciable amount, I own/use and have trained others with the Rika, a similar training tool.  The one thing I often mention is that the greatest learning you can achieve with an electronic trainer is finding out how to "see" your activity directly.  This is difficult to explain, but by using the trainer, if you really work on it, you can learn to see through your sights in real time what the trainer will show you in review.  Once you accomplish that, the trainer's main use is in aggregating shots and retaining data to follow trends and to review that you are "seeing" what you should.  At that point, the trainer will be less important in your training.

I'm also unfamiliar with the newest capabilities of the various trainers, but I would suggest looking around a little first and maybe see if someone local to you has any type of trainer.  You might then be able to compare features to see if the Scatt is the one that matches best what you need.

I have a Mantis X and have been quite pleased with it. I use it for dry fire in conjunction with my iPad.

Would not mind having a Scatt, but the price was right on the Mantis.

I have not used on for pistol but on a rifle... as Ed said, direct visual feed back of the errors you are making that cause the shot to end up someplace other than where you wanted it.  you can try different techniques like grip pressure or alignment and clearly see if you hold and wobble improves or not.  The Scatt has an incredibly powerful software for tracking your progress too. It cost a lot more than the Mantis but it does more too.  The decision comes down to do you just want to see a trace or do you want the data behind the trace to understand what is really going on.

Thank you for all of the responses to this point. I have had a mantis for a couple of years and it has been very helpful to a point. Thought as the the company has said before, it's really not geared towards bullseye shooters. I am looking for a little more usable data. I am a solid/consistent 93% shooter. I really want to work to get to those master/hm level score. Unfortunately current life is not going to allow very much range time. I was hoping the Scatt would be a good way to help boost, or atleast maintain, my current abilities, while also making dryfire a little more interesting, for the foreseeable future. I hope that makes sense.

You can gain a lot more data, but it's what you do with the data.  The Rika does not offer suggestion for improvement.  The Scatt may, but I thought maybe the MantisX did, as well.  In any event, I am a strong voice for studying to find what works rather than looking for errors.  So, whatever trainer you are working with, look for positive traits.

I put up a page long ago for use with the Rika, that addressed an aspect of refining the trigger operation that I felt important.  In case it's of interest, you can find it at:

Trigger Training with the Rika

It may be adaptable to other trainers if the concept is of interest.

Ed Hall wrote:You can gain a lot more data, but it's what you do with the data.  The Rika does not offer suggestion for improvement.  The Scatt may, but I thought maybe the MantisX did, as well.  In any event, I am a strong voice for studying to find what works rather than looking for errors.  So, whatever trainer you are working with, look for positive traits.

I put up a page long ago for use with the Rika, that addressed an aspect of refining the trigger operation that I felt important.  In case it's of interest, you can find it at:

Trigger Training with the Rika

It may be adaptable to other trainers if the concept is of interest.

Thank you! The data that the both Rika and Scatt ET collect is fascinating. I definitely understand your point about them helping you see your activity. I think being able to visualize, via the trace, what every movement/change translates to can be very helpful in refining my understanding of the results. The trace does seem a little overwhelming. I need to do more research on how to read everything properly which I think is one of my concerns. If I'm going to invest in the device I want be able to use it to its fullest. I have found a couple videos, but there isn't a ton of info out there. I understand it's possible to find coaches that use the Scatt to give tips and pointers remotely. That is an interesting proposition also.

I don't know if this helps, in fact it may be more confusing, but this is one way I use SCATT (I have not used other trainers).  What you see is the Coordination graph for a ten shot, reduced B-6 50 yrd session.  The result of that session was a 95-1.

As you may recall, a Coordination graph is the average for all the shots in the session.  Here are the positives.  The graph trends down.  The hold settles into the 10-ring, on average, about 0.4 seconds before the shot.

Here are the improvement observations.  When I look at my graphs, I consistently 'peak' about 0.2 to 0.4 seconds before the shot moment, as seen in this graph.  i.e. The best shot moment, on average, is about 2/10 to 4/10 of a second before the actual shot moment.  I see this in the vast majority of my graphs.  Based on this, I seem to be waiting till the optimal time before completing the trigger pull.  This, of course, is not how you shoot Bullseye.

Also, I would like to lower the overall graph, which means I am shooting more tens.  And I know why my graphs are higher than I would like.  When I look at the aggregrate target (the picture of the target with all your shots) I have at least one or two out in the 7/8 ring.  Since this graph is an average of all shots, those outliers will raise the graph.  And when I look at the Distance graph for those outliners, invariably I am in the 10-ring well before the actual shot but I wait too long and I drift or trigger jerk into the outer rings.  I can look at my trace of the outlier and tell if I drifted or jerked.  And I can look at the individual Distance graphs and find the shots where there is no lag and ask myself, What did I do differently on that shot?

I bought my SCATT when shooting rifle, it was a huge help for both rifle and eventually for pistol.  I could tell by the trace what was going on and what I needed to focus on.

What made the biggest improvement for me is when I realized what I needed to do I turned the SCATT off and focused on my training to improve.  Then maybe a day or 2 later I'd fire up the SCATT to check progress.  If my training was helping it was maybe a week before I checked again.  Having it on all the time was distracting for me.
- Dave

Do any of you fine people know how to turn of the decimal scoring in the Professional software? I am shooting the b16 target and it defaulted to decimal scoring. I know score isn't what I should be paying attention to, I apparently need to focus mostly on my speed, but I was just curious. Ty

Jwhelan939 wrote:Do any of you fine people know how to turn of the decimal scoring ...

While I am not a fine person, I am not sure it is possible to turn off decimal scoring.  However, Alex gave us his email address.  It was alex@scatt.com.  I am sure he would be glad to answer the question.

In the meantime, this is what I do.  I go to Tools > Options > and under Shot list, I uncheck Shot results.  This does not turn off scoring.  It just hides the individual scores.  Even with this unchecked, you will see a group total under the shot number (#) column.  The good news is, the total score is rounded correctly.  For example, I shot a 100 B-8 target and under the Result column, it totaled 104.3.  But the total under the shot number column was 100.  (And no, SCATT does not show an X count.)

Not sure you read it in the other thread, but the video from the SCATT presentation is available.

Very quick response from Alex. You can not turn off the decimal scoring.