Table of Contents:
– Introduction
– Unboxing,Look, and Feel
– Ballistic Software
– Field Usage and some Specifics on the Garmin’s Function
– Summary and Conclusion
Introduction:
Garmin never says die. (Does anybody still get this reference?) Seriously though – few companies survive a seismic shift in their core business as anything more than a shell of their former selves. Just ask RIM or Nokia about that. Garmin, on the other hand, survived the near total dissolution of the aftermarket standalone automotive GPS market they so dominated and rebounded to become a larger company than at the peak of that market. This is a feat rare enough that I have seen their rebound mentioned in a variety of business and tech publications. Garmin’s survival and ultimate success was a result of their diversification to products well outside the core market in which their products had become so dominant and made so much money. In addition to a variety of GPS devices, Garmin today makes a wide selection of smartwatches for a number of different markets, satellite communications equipment, marine navigation and autopilot equipment, sonar, aviation navigation and autopilot equipment, bow sights, exercise bikes, and a virtually endless variety of other stuff, including this Xero chronograph. This is really an astonishing variety of products from a company far larger than is typical in the outdoor equipment industry. At 42B in market cap, Garmin is actually a more valuable company than Ford Motor. I can attest that, despite this massive size, they are far nimbler than I would expect from such a massive company. In general, I have found that the larger the company, the slower their communications response and the less informed their people are about both their products and the industry they are competing in. This has not been the case with Garmin. They have been both prompt and knowledgeable in their responses to my queries.
Unboxing, Look, and Feel
Boy this Garmin chrono is small and light. In the Internet parlance of the day, it’s less than half a banana long and weighs in at less than half a banana as well. For those who remember wallets, it’s smaller and lighter than those, too. It will easily slip into your range bag end cap pocket, though you may want to find some sort of small ditty bag to protect it. Despite its $600 price tag, the Garmin Xero C1 Pro doesn’t include even a softshell carrying case similar to the one that my $40 Teslong borescope came in. For shame. All that is included with the Chrono unit is a USB A-C charging cable (no transformer block) and a little plastic ¼” threaded tripod. The chrono has a standard ¼” threaded stud molded into the bottom so you can attach it to the included tripod or to any other ¼” threaded tripod. For what it’s worth, despite its perfunctory appearance and complete lack of adjustability, the little included tripod has actually proven quite serviceable for both bench shooting and for those little tables you get at standing indoor ranges.
The Garmin Chrono physical layout is pretty simple. It has four nice, firm, and clicky buttons on top for navigating the menu system that don’t feel like they will disintegrate and turn to slime in five years, a USB-C on the side for charging and for connecting to the PC Garmin Express software, and a black and white LCD display on the back. This screen has both functional backlighting for indoor use and excellent bright outdoor sunlight performance. It doesn’t wash out or reflect and glare like many displays. I have found the navigation of the internal menu quite simple. It has an easy wizard to set up recording on a new shot string and a nice history of previous strings. These are arranged by the automatically recorded date and time of the string. You can view all the shots in a string and remove shots from strings quite easily, as well as view the principal variable such as ES, SD, Mean, Min, and Max. You do not appear to be able to add new shots to an old string, though, such as you might want to do if you paused shooting a rifle to let it cool down and wanted to shoot another rifle while it cooled while taking data on both rifles. You can pause and restart strings to go down range or something, but you can’t take data in between. This, and the fact that the bullet weight you enter when setting up a string does not show up on the string history in the unit, are my only complaints about the in-chrono software. It is pretty good and I almost always used the chrono unconnected to the phone application.
Now let’s get to the biggest poor design decision. As you may have guessed, the battery is unfortunately not of the easily replaceable variety. It is a rechargeable internal lithium ion like many cell phones have. You have to partially disassemble the chrono if you need to get at it. Additionally, Garmin does not offer a battery replacement service, nor do they directly sell replacements. Fortunately, some of our handy forum users have done a little reverse engineering and found the battery to be a fairly standard sized (at least for the moment) 820mAh 3.7V battery pack that can be had online for around $25. There does appear to be some ungluing involved in a battery replacement, so care would need to be taken not to damage things, as the battery appears to be glued on or near the back of the display. I have checked with Garmin and the battery and chrono do not include any pernicious anti-third-party repair prevention software to prevent replacement. In summary, an eventual user battery replacement is possible, but is not as easy as swapping out an 18650 lithium ion cell. Additionally, in the event the Garmin chrono has a dead battery, whether temporarily or permanently, the unit can be run using an external power pack attached to the USB port. This is also an excellent mode to run the unit in if you need more than 6 hours runtime, such as if you’re commercially using it in a test range. Lastly, replacing the battery in the Garmin Chrono yourself will void the warranty, but that is really not much of a concern as its warranty is only one year and it’s pretty unlikely the battery will die in that span. Speaking of those 18650 batteries they should have used, the 18650 is a rechargeable standard of lithium ion battery that would have been a great choice for this device. They are the same chemistry and resulting voltage as the Garmin internal battery and are widely available from very high quality brands for $10-$20 a piece. They are even the right size to have easily incorporated in the design. Most of us already have them because that is what most rechargeable headlamps run on. As a bonus, 18650s have around a 3,500mAh capacity and so would provide 4x the amount of runtime as the chosen 820mAh internal battery for a minimal increase in the size of the resulting device. There is really no excuse for this internal battery design. This is not the cell phone industry. I expect most shooters intend to keep these devices longer than average lifespan of a rechargeable battery and value easily replaceable wear components.
Ballistic Software
The Garmin Xero C1 Pro Chronograph can interface with both the Garmin ShotView phone application specific to this product and the multi-product Garmin Express PC application. In theory, ShotView can carry out all the functions necessary, but as we will see, it has some issues.
The Garmin ShotView phone application is intended to add significant functionality to the chrono as well as handle firmware updates and allow you to store your data in your account in the Garmin cloud. Installing the app unfortunately does require you to set up a Garmin account to facilitate this cloud storage when you install even if you opt out of the cloud storage feature. You can do everything in the app that you can do on the device itself in addition to a number of other things. If you are using the app while recording shot strings on the chrono, the shots will also update in the app. In the app, you have additional labeling functionality, such as changing the name of a shot string to add more detail or writing notes to be saved with the string that might include information like atmospherics or load data. This is pretty important stuff for your data record. In the app you are also not limited to the 50 strings of 100 shots each data storage maximum the device itself has. The chrono itself appears to have only 56megs of internal memory, no slot for more, and a hard limit of 50 strings even if those strings are only a few shots each. After that, you are prompted to delete a string each time you want to add a new one. Given that your labeling of strings in the device is very limited, this is probably plenty of capacity, as I’m sure you can’t keep track of what each string was anyway. The app does not have these limitations and so you can feasibly keep a record of all your sessions there with notes on what each string represents. The app also allows one to export this data into a CSV file that you can e-mail to yourself if you want another way to keep your records, which is a nice feature.
The issue I have with the Garmin ShotView app is not its functionality, but rather that it has some bugs. It is supposed to automatically update the firmware in the chrono whenever there is an update, but mine didn’t accomplish this and so I needed to download the Garmin Express app for the PC to accomplish a firmware update. The PC app doesn’t have any other functions with the Xero C1 Pro Chronograph. It just updates the firmware and adds itself to Windows startup, as it evidently thinks this once-in-a-blue-moon function justifies automatically running every time you start your PC. The ShotView smartphone app also struggles to complete a number of its other tasks and is prone to crashing. It is supposed to pull new shot strings that were taken when the app was not connected to the chrono from the chrono when it reconnects but it struggles with this and appears to pull just 3 or 4 new strings each connection before inexplicably stopping. If you try to hit the refresh under the device screen, the app then just locks up and needs to be restarted. I guess I will eventually have all my strings pulled over, but in 5-6 connections they are not all there yet. I appreciate the added function the app gives the chrono, but as feels pretty par-for-the-shooting-industry-smartphone-app-course, it is buggy.
Field Usage and Some Specifics on the Garmin’s Function
I have now used the Garmin Xero C1 Pro Chronograph at a wide variety of ranges with a variety of both handgun and rifle cartridges for more than a thousand rounds. I’ve used it on .22lr (waxed with rifle and bare lead with handgun), 9mm, .223rem, .308win, 6.5cm, 45-70gvt, and 350L. In this lineup, only the .22lr is particularly challenging for many chronographs. I recommend this PrimalRights video if you’re interested in seeing performance data from some exotic and challenging cartridges. In my testing, I’ve used the Garmin chrono on crowded shooting lines and all alone. I’ve used it standing, seated at a bench, and prone. I’ve used it positioned properly the correct distance from the muzzle and I have used it sitting on that little fold-down table indoor ranges have which is nowhere near as close to the muzzle as the Garmin recommendation.
For the rifle rounds, I have always properly positioned the Garmin and it has never missed a single round. It has also never improperly recorded a round from the lane beside me, though it has had ample opportunity. This is simply remarkable. It just plain works, all the time. It is not finicky or temperamental. In fact, it has even picked up the vast majority of handgun rounds I fired rapidly at the indoor range with the Garmin sitting on the little range table way below where it was supposed to be positioned relative to the muzzle and with only about 20ft of distance to catch the projectile in before the target. I have also talked to a number of folks who have attached the Garmin on brackets to their rifle so they could record while actively moving from barricade to barricade. Despite the Garmin not being labeled for this, they have had good function and not experienced breakage. The Garmin simply works. It even works in a lot of situations where you aren’t following the directions.
A little note on exactly how the Garmin Xero C1 Pro works. It is a Doppler radar based unit. This means it sends out pulses of radio waves to bounce off the projectile and measures the shift in their return frequency to calculate their velocity. Unlike some other Doppler units, the Garmin sends these pulses out constantly when it is on and not just when specifically triggered by the sound or recoil of a shot. Whenever a shot string is active, the Garmin is always sending out pulses and measuring returns. This is why it does not have difficulty failing to trigger on a shot or triggering mistakenly on somebody else’s shot. Also of interest, the Garmin does see those other shots from nearby lanes. It just has the ability to detect that their trajectory originates too far from the unit to have been fired by the intended shooter and therefore determines they should not be recorded. Despite the remarkable amount of time it spends actively measuring, the Garmin will run a long time on a battery. They advertise it can actively measure for 6 hours on a charge and this is in line with what I have observed. That is pretty impressive for a tiny 820 mAh battery. It is sending out very low energy pulses indeed.
Regarding accuracy, I had intended to measure the accuracy of the Garmin readings for this review using the super expensive laboratory grade chronograph at the Lapua rimfire test facility locally. Unfortunately, when I called them up to do so, I found that, despite the Garmin only being out for a few months at that time, they had already replaced that expensive laboratory chronograph with the Garmin unit I wanted to test. That probably tells you everything you need to know about its accuracy, though I am sad to say I don’t have any significant data to add on the question as I was unable to find a meaningful standard to measure against.
Summary and Conclusion
Prior to buying the Garmin chrono I am here reviewing, I was using an Oehler P35 chronograph whose design dates back to 1989. Over the years along the way, I have used a number of friends’ chronographs, including the Magnetospeed. Many of these were an upgrade from the Oehler in many ways. I just hadn’t felt they were better enough to be worth upgrading, despite the huge pain the butt that logging the suitcase-sized Oehler to the range and setting it up on a tripod was. I had considered doing so a number of times, but the downsides of the barrel harmonics change I had noticed with the Magnetospeed, inconsistent triggering others had told me about with the original LabRadar, and the difficulty both have with .22lr had kept me from dropping the substantial coin. This year, because of the amount of measurement I expected to need to do surrounding the 350L PurePrecision SKLTN straight wall cartridge build, and what good things I had heard, I went ahead and purchased the Garmin. This ended up a hugely important choice, as that cartridge has certainly lived up to its finicky reputation and the data I have taken with the Garmin has been vital to figuring out what is going on with particular lots of ammunition and particular loads. Much of this was data I likely would not have been able to collect with the Oehler, as its setup and positioning is time-consuming and finicky enough that you pretty much need to have the range to yourself to use it. This requires me to use a different range twice the distance from my home and it costs $20 per trip instead of the closer one that costs $24 a year. The Garmin made taking measurements easy, however, and so I had the data that proved so important in diagnosing specific ammunition issues.
It really is remarkable how small, easy, simple, and reliable the Garmin Xero C1 Pro Chronograph is. It can really make you forget how much of a PITA using a chrono was before it existed. In that regard, it introduces an entirely new era to the industry. Every future product will be measured relative to the Garmin. It’s not a perfect product: It’s very expensive, has a built in battery that will not be fun to eventually replace, a very short 1-year warranty, software that is a bit buggy, and it lacks a quality case or accessories. However, it is simply remarkable when it comes to how easily, and reliably, it will measure pretty much any projectile. I have not had a single missed rifle round out of roughly 1,000 rounds across 5 calibers and with not a single round mistakenly recorded from another shooter in the next lane over. That is just unbelievably good from a unit that is smaller and lighter than my wallet.
