Unofficial Review - Square Golf Launch Monitor

[14likd1]

In my quest for continuing to improve my golf game during the off season I have made the financially irresponsible decision to purchase a second Launch Monitor this year, the Square Golf Launch Monitor.

Some quick background on me. My name is Kevin I'm not really "from" anywhere (I've lived in 3 "countries" and 7 cities) and I currently reside in Palmer, Alaska where the season is basically over. I just started playing golf this year and am a high handicap golfer scoring around the high 90's to low 100's from the white tees at the Palmer Golf Course. However, since the ground has started to get hard (I use simulator tees at the tee box now), I have been consistently scoring in the low 90's to mid 80's I'm not sure what to make of that information. The biggest issues with my game is being consistent and my iron game.

Because the season is practically over, I will not be able to play golf out on a course for at least 5 months more likely 6. My goal with getting this launch monitor is to give myself context into how I am hitting and giving me a guiding direction in where I need to improve. I don't want to be feeling good about myself hitting into a net only to come find out I spent half of my golf "career" ingraining bad habits.

What I am hoping the Square Golf Launch Monitor can help me with is:

1. Give me accurate enough data
2. Easy to setup
3. Easy to use

What drew me to the this particular launch monitor was:

1. The Inaccurate (tbd) data I was getting on the Rapsodo MLM
2. Being able to position closer to the net with my setup (shameless cross promotion)
3. More data points (spin being the important one for me)
4. Low cost to continue using

Unboxing Experience

The order came from the UK and got to me quite fast (ship time of 1 week) wrapped in inspection wrappings and notes all over.

Unboxing all the wrapping I was greeted with a very compact packaging. I bet the packaging could be reduced significantly as the individual boxes still had a lot of space left in them as well but the swing stick took up the most real estate.

There were 5 individual boxes that contained the entire setup and in them were (From Top to Bottom, Left to Right)

1. The Swing Stick
2. Launch Monitor
3. Remote and Battery
4. Charging Cable
5. 3 Marked balls by Saint Nine
6. Shaft Reflective Sticker
7. Launch Monitor Battery
8. 1,000 Credit Code
9. Swing Stick Safety Strap
10. Manual

The Launch monitor was scarily light, weighing in at only 470g with the battery (350g without making it lighter than a can of Coke Zero). Because of how light the Launch monitor is, It was hard to tell how "well built" it was just by feel. The machine did not rattle or seem to have any loose parts when I rattled it around and the housing seems like it was made of aluminum with the only close description I can give is like a piece of house decoration.

Once all of that had been unboxed, I went ahead and downloaded the Square Golf app on the App store. Setup was quick and easy, you register a account and are treated with a quick tutorial explaining the basics of how to setup and use the launch monitor (example image below).

Overall I am very impressed with how the experience has been so far, only thing I wish they had included was a case of some kind. I will be testing the launch monitor over the next week and come back with my impression on how it plays.

 

 

Initial Use Impression

Just finished using the launch monitor at a local indoor golf facility that uses Apogee launch monitor.

Here are my initial thoughts:

1. Setup was quite quick I would say, turning on the device, opening the app and then doing a quick calibration and you are ready to go. Once you get the hang of it, it can be done as little as a few minutes.
2. The remote did not seem to want to work, I was looking forward to switching clubs using the remote so I didn't have to fiddle with my phone but It didn't seem to respond when you went into practice mode (haven't tried with game)
3. Ball flight and distance seemed to be tracking with the Apogee launch monitor though the numbers don't seem to match (I will be looking at this much closer and reporting on the numbers at a later time)
   • I discovered that you can select the type of ball you are hitting which adds 5% for premium and 10% for distance balls
4. You can't customize the clubs you have in your bag right now
5. I wish there is some kind of online portal, interacting only in the phone becomes a hassle.

I will write up some more after putting in some more mileage on this device.

 

First Simulator Play through

First thing I must mention is that I am not a person who golfs a lot on the simulator. I think in total I've played around 3-4 rounds of golf on the Simulator. I am also a very visual player and so my chipping, pitching and putting abilities on the simulator are atrocious. With that in mind I would say that my first round being played on the simulator went about alright.

The biggest criticism I would say I had was the putting concede distance. At only 4 ft, I found it extremely difficult to putt and it was frustrating to end a hole which made the experience overall very frustrating. I hope they allow the option for 10ft concede since putting with my current setup is atrocious.

Numbers

(Work In Progress)

Final Impressions (8.0/10)

TL:DR I give this a 8.0/10 for now. However, I believe that the launch monitor can become a 9.0/10 once the product matures on the software side and potentially more club data points be added (which I don't see any reason why they cannot add in the future).

It's been about two weeks now since I have received the Square Golf Launch Monitor. During that period, I have had 4 Driving range sessions and have consumer 55 credits which represents almost 3 rounds of golf being played. The launch monitor has been my favorite tool to use so far. While I initially did not expect myself to use the golf simulator as much, I have enjoyed my experience so much that I know I will probably have to buy some more credits near the end of this off-season. My main "frustration" but also hope for this launch monitor is that this is still a very immature product. On the software side there are a little rough on the edges, whether that be a busy and deep menu, unclear settings and options, no data on Game sessions or the lack of a portal where you can have a better overview of your game sessions (which can be remedied by having a E6 or GSPro connection).

Packaging all those features into a compact IR/Camera side setup, the Square Golf Launch Monitor stands out among all the other launch monitors as it's what I would consider the most well rounded launch monitor being able to offer a little bit of everything a golfer might want to get that golf fix during the off season.

Pros:

• Sufficiently Accurate Ball number
• Cheap IR Camera Launch Monitor
• Great Simulator software included
• Quick readout of data after shot
• Option to connect to E6 and GSPro
• "Cheap" cost to play Simulator Golf
• Able to capture putting data

Cons:

• Questionable Club Data accuracy
• Missing Club Head Speed and Smash Factor data points (hopefully it will be added in the future)
• Software a little rough to use on the phone

 

Edited November 9 by 14likd1
Added updates

[WaffleHouseTour]

Good luck.  I’m curious how the Swing Stick works out for you. It conjures up memories of playing Wii Golf w my kids…. I hope it’s superior to that. 

[14likd1]

5 hours ago, WaffleHouseTour said:

Good luck.  I’m curious how the Swing Stick works out for you. It conjures up memories of playing Wii Golf w my kids…. I hope it’s superior to that. 

Thanks!

I'll be honest I don't plan to use the Swingstick in the long run but I don't mind testing it a bit as well. Interestingly, according to the user manual (shown in the image below), the Swingstick enables the capture of Face angle and Dynamic loft data points which to me means that they could potentially make that a measurement for actual clubs in the future as well if they have reflective stickers on the club face. 

As for the feel of the swing stick, while it's much better than a wii remote, I believe it harms me more than it helps. In my opinion, the best use of the swing stick is to give people who don't play golf the chance to "play" golf.

[WaffleHouseTour]

Glad you have your eyes open to all of that. 

[14likd1]

First Session Numbers (ft/ Apogee)

This took quite a bit to get written down and all calculated. The % that are highlighted shows the percent difference between the datapoints is (Square/Apogee). I'm not really sure if using Standard deviation was the right call here, it was something I thought might be better. I know that the sample size here is tiny so I will try and get more data points the next time, I also plan to use other launch monitors as well.

I am willing to take on suggestions on how to better my data collection

Some thoughts after my first look at the numbers:

1. The difference between the Square and the Maxfli seems almost negligable
2. If I had selected the premium ball option the carry and total difference will go down a lot
3. There seems to be a lot of bad club data and data relating to spin and launch direction.
   • It seems like the Apogee measures Side Spin differently from the Square so maybe we can't actually use this data

I have plans to publish a master document of all the numbers, but for now I will post each session here just so I can keep notes and take in comments/feedback of my testing methodology.

Edited October 31 by 14likd1
Added final comment

[cbrusty]

I just started testing with mine against my Garmin R10. It's debatable how accurate the R10 is in my garage space, but that's all I can compare against right now.

I haven't done a full scientific test yet, but anecdotally the numbers are similar with my 8 iron (no reflective tape). With my driver there were some slight differences (added the reflective tape). The points below are based on the first driver test.

Pros:

- Ball speed is consistently within 1 mph +/- of R10

- Launch direction and vertical angle within 1 degree +/- of R10

- Gear effect seemed to be working ok (one of my gripes with the R10). I could start a ball left that would come back right and visa versa.

- Didn't notice much of difference between using Square's ball with dots, TaylorMade Pix ball, Callaway Chrome Tour with graphics, and Titleist RCT ball (for R10)


Cons (need more testing):
 - No altitude adjustment in the app. Using the premium ball setting got closer to my R10 carry/total numbers for my location (1,000 ft) and a little shorter than the FlightScope web simulator numbers ( https://trajectory.flightscope.com/ ).

- Club path was consistently way more Out-to-In than the R10, this led to higher right side spin rates than the R10. I am going to test moving the reflective tape slightly up/down to see if that makes a difference (?).

- The session export seems somewhat broken:

• I exported my first test session. The "Offline (yd)" column always shows offline to the right at very exaggerated numbers. This was in opposition to what actually showed on the screen when hitting on the Square range. It's also way off from the R10 and also comparing on the FlightScope web simulator.
  
  Example shot with driver (measured by Square):
  Ball speed: 145, VLaunch: 12.1, HLaunch: 1.8 left, Spin rate: 2180, Spin axis: 4.4 left
      - FlightScope: 10.4 Left
      - Slightly different readings from R10, final offline: 6 Left
      - CSV session export from Square, Offline (yd): 45.5 Right ???
   

I'm going to do some more testing in the next couple weeks. So far, I've only tried the range. I also need to try to pair it with GSPro to see if the final carry/distance/offline numbers normalize more to what I'm expecting to see based on sessions on Trackman, but we'll see.