Radio interview

Today I did an interview with the BBC Radio4 In Touch programme about VI shooting. It will be broadcast later today at 20:40 British Summer Time.

For those of you not familiar with the In Touch programme, it is a weekly BBc Radio4 programme with news, views and information for people with vision impairment.

UPDATE: Should you have missed the programme or want to listen again then you can do this by visiting the programme page and pressing the listen again button. For those who don't want to sign in to iPlayer, you will have to wait for the podcast version to be made available, it should be available soon. My interview is the last item of the show, a few minutes before the end.

ISCH win

Last week saw the International Shooting Competition of Hanover (ISCH) and they had VI shooting in the programme of events this year. It has been a few years now since I have been to an international competition, so it was quite nice to be back competing at an international.

There were a few things different this time. This time rather than flying the journey was done by road, what a difference it makes when you can just drop all the equipment into a car and just forget about it for the rest of the journey and this time my body was feeling the benefit of having not been carrying round heavy bags. The other difference was that Pauline who now assists me at my local club went as my assistant for the competition, so we were able to train how things would work in competition better than in the past where I have had a different assistant at the competition.

As you may have guest from the title of this post, I did win in the standing discipline which was the only discipline I was competing in. In the qualifying I was feeling very comfortable with my shooting and finished with a very good lead. In the final I was finding things slightly harder and had a few bad shots and so that was much closer throughout the whole final. I am very pleased with this win, after all the work and changes which have been made to my position over the last few months the win just confirms the hard work has paid off.

It was great to be there and meet up with so many others involved in shooting. A number of people were encouraging me to take up prone more seriously and also to compete in that. If travelling by car to competition is going to become more regular then I may be tempted to do it. Anyway back to the hard work of training, there is the world cup in France in September I would like to go to if possible, ISCH has woken me up again to international competition.

VIASS, I knew the plastic clamp was a mistake

Whilst doing some home training with my new LG400 I decided to try fitting the VIASS to it. To my surprise it was not quite as simple as I had been expecting. Initially the LG400 looks like it should be very good for VI shooting as the loading lever can be fitted on either side, either going up or going down when in the open position. Having the lever going down means that there should be no problems in fitting a scope to the rifle as nothing comes above the mounting rail. Well that is what I thought, but it turns out that on the right hand side of the rifle there are a couple of linking rods connecting the spindle of the lever to the sliding mechanism of the bolt and when the loading port is in the open position these actually rise up alongside the mounting rail. Unfortunately the bulky plastic clamp of the VIASS is just too wide and will get in the way of these linking rods.

Not all is lost if you want to fit the VIASS to the LG400, there are a couple of possible solutions. The first is to use a sight raising block to mount the VIASS and the LG400 comes with a sight raising block which is suitable. However if you want to avoid raising the VIASS more than you need to the other option is to consider fitting it to the rail just in front of the loading port, but this does place the VIASS further from you which means you may need to reach further when making adjustments. I cannot help thinking neither of these need to be done if the VIASS had been slightly differently designed. If it had either used a narrower clamp like that on the EcoAims VIS500 or used standard scope mounts then this problem would simply have not occurred.

New rifle

Last week I got my new air rifle, a Walther LG400 Alutec Expert. Some of you might be thinking, so why the new rifle? We may all like getting our hands on nice new bits of shooting kit and the Walther is that, but there were a few other reasons as well.

Probably the first is that for the last ten years or so I have only been shooting with my Steyr LG110 and prior to that with club rifles which don't really come to the same standard. I was given the chance to have the Walther on a trial period, so I thought may be it is time to try something different to see how it compares to the Steyr. Its always good to try a few things so you really get the chance to know what you like.

There also have been a few other things in the past where the Steyr just does not quite seem to be ideal. My steyr has had a few small alterations, mainly to alter the palm rest for the supporting hand and the cheek piece. Probably one of the biggest concerns I had on the Steyr is that for some reason my LG110 did not like going between dry-fire and live firing, with the next shot after a dry-fire always going low, in the 3 ring of a air rifle target. So with my Steyr, I had to avoid doing dry-fire within competitions.

So how does the Walther compare? Its probably a bit early to say as I have only had it a week and there is much tweaking to do, but initially it all feels good. Having said that though, the Steyr is still a good rifle and the differences probably are either personal preference or only really make the difference when you are trying to convert 9s on the air rifle target into 10s. There are still a few things about the Steyr I think I prefer, such as how dead it feels as you release the shot, but is that just learning something new after 10 years of the same?

EcoAims VIS500 reviewed

In a number of previous posts I have mentioned about the EcoAims VIS500 and that it at the moment is my aiming device of choice when I am shooting air rifle. However I realise I have never really done a post about the VIS500 to give you an overview of the device and my view on its good and bad points. So time to put that right, in this post I will give a bit of a review of the EcoAims VIS500.

Who is EcoAims?

For those of you who have not heard of EcoAims before, they are a company who make a number of electronic shooting devices, such as modern pentathlon laser pistols and the VI biathlon system which has been used in paralympic biathlon events since 2002. So I would expect that they should have good experience in tracking the point of aim of a gun. However the VIS500 as far as I know is the first product from EcoAims which is to be attached to a gun and used whilst live firing.

The VIS500

Now to the actual device. Like the VIASS Pro, the VIS500 is an infrared based system, requiring an IR LED to be placed near the target. It has been approved for use in international competitions by both IBSA and WSPS, so big tick for those who are interested in international competition.

The VIS500 has a fairly slim design to it, however you will still need to be careful of guns with loading mechanisms which come upwards as they could clash with the VIS500. This is actually part of the reason why I cannot use the VIS500 on the Walther LP400 air pistol. Also it is worth noting that the mounting clamp on the VIS500 is shorter than the device and is only at the rear end, meaning that you have a good amount of scope protruding forward of the mounting point, the second part as to why it will not fit on the air pistol when using standard parts for mounting.

The build quality of the VIS500 feels good. Whilst there are some plastic parts, metal is used in the places where I feel it requires it, such as the mounting clamp and support frame.

The sighting adjusters are mechanical adjusters operated by a dial on the top and right hand side. Whilst I like the electronic adjustments on the VIASS, the intuitive nature of making adjustments, the reliability of adjustments and the ability to adjust it from a computer to set specific values thus making it simpler to swap between different guns or shooters, it must be said that a good set of mechanical adjusters will also do a good job. Although the mechanism on the VIS500 feels slightly basic, having the adjusters move the rear end of the device about, the adjusters do seem to be working fairly well in use.

The VIS500 is the only aiming device I have used with the battery built in. I have mixed views on this. It is good not to have additional cables providing power or needing to find somewhere to mount a battery pack to the rifle. However it has the disadvantage that you need the VIS500 to charge its battery, no just taking the battery home to charge. Also it is not possible to have a spare battery for it, although as a backup I guess you could have a USB charger or a USB battery. The other disadvantage is that by having the battery built in, it makes the VIS500 heavier than the VIASS. Personally the weight of the VIS500 is not a problem for me with the rifle, it might be if it were to be used on an air pistol.

On the left hand side of the VIS500, you have a mini USB port for power and connecting with the EcoAims software on a PC, the power button and three indicator LEDs. Whilst in my role of IBSA shooting chair person I have concerns over the presence of indicator LEDs and whether it could impact upon sight classification by giving some shooters additional information, the LEDs are useful for the assistant in training. There is a power indicator which doubles as a low battery warning by changing colour when the internal battery is low, an on target indicator and a shot indicator which flashes when the VIS500 detects a shot being taken.

There is no on-board volume control, you will need an inline volume control and EcoAims supplies one in the package. The final thing to note about the physical design is the headphone socket. The placement pointing forwards and upwards near the top front end of the scope may seem slightly odd at first, but in actual use it seems well placed. By not placing it on either side it will work equally well for either a left or right handed shooter, you can route the cable off to which ever side of the gun you prefer. To have the cable exit at the rear could have had problems for the shooter as the cable might get in the way of head placement on the rear of the stock. For me I have found using an extension cable looping it back along the left side of the rifle, tucking it under the cheek piece and around the cheek piece support and then down to the shooting jacket pocket where I plug in my headphones works well and I never notice the cable in use.

The sound

This is where you will notice the origins of the VIS500 and that the biathlon system was the previous audio aiming system from EcoAims. It definitely has similarities to the sound of the biathlon system, but it has also definitely evolved into something else. The VIS500 has three main different regions, off target, outer region of target and inner region. When the VIS500 cannot detect the IR LED it produces a low beep every second or so, I guess to just remind you it is on. Once the VIS500 can detect the IR LED, it starts producing a varying pitch tone, increasing in pitch as it gets closer to the target centre. Unlike the Swarovski the VIS500 has a stepped tone, you hear it jump from one tone to another where as the Swarovski smoothly transitioned. At first this can seem off putting, but I have found that as I have got used to it I probably can shoot just as well with the VIS500 as I could with the Swarovski. Also as the shooter's technique improves and they become more stable and the movement is slower, the steps become less noticeable as the jumps become less and also less frequent.

I mentioned that there is an inner and outer target region, what is the difference between these? In the configuration software for the PC, there is a setting where you can define the radius of a zone in the middle of the target and you can have the tone pulse inside or outside of that region. The speed of the pulsing can be selected in the configuration software, allowing you to define the on and off durations. Even when the tone pulses it will still change pitch depending on the point of aim. I have my VIS500 set so that when the rifle is pointing outside the 9 ring of a air rifle target it will pulse and if it is pointing at the 9 or better it will be a constant tone. Having it change from pulsing to constant just gives me a very clear indication when I am getting very close to the target centre and helps me assess how good my hold is. I do like how even with the inner zone you still get the change in pitch as it means I can still seek out the very best point of aim and have an idea of the amount of movement. This is what I don't like about the VIASS, its inner zone just had a single tone with no variation in pitch inside the inner zone.

As well as being able to change the inner and outer zones, it is possible to select from three different sound curves. A sound curve is how the pitch changes for the distance from the target centre. As an example you could have it change linearly with the distance from the target centre, or you could have it that the pitch changes quicker in the centre than near the outside. Unfortunately the software just labels the three different curves A, B and C, it would be nice to know what each curve is meant to be like.

The software

EcoAims has software for configuring some parameters of the VIS500 and also some training software so it can be used for dry-fire training. Other than the sound customisations I mentioned above, the configuration software allows adjusting the shot sensor. I have already discussed the training software in a previous post. In summary though I would say the training software is a nice extra but would not be a big pull for choosing the VIS500 as for a VI person it is fairly limited what can be done. Also having the separate software for configuration and training is slightly awkward at times, mainly when setting the shot sensor level as you can only have one of the software tools open at a time and so you may find yourself switching between them more than you want.

Conclusion

Well you may already know my view on the VIS500. Whilst seeming simpler than the VIASS, the VIS500 works very well and is well thought through. I feel some of the simplicity helps as you do not have too many settings to confuse you and it is not as critical to configure the sound parameters optimally. The settings which can be configured on the VIS500 do add value and are useful.

The VIS500 is let down by its mounting options, always having a significant amount of it protruding forward of the mounting point making it impossible to fit in some cases without designing custom parts. Also the sound will put off some as the steps in tone is not as pleasing to listen to as the devices with a smoothly varying tone.

Having seen the VIS500 at different times as it developed and evolved from the biathlon system, I know how EcoAims has gradually made the VIS500 a better device. Over that time my feeling towards the EcoAims VIS500 has gradually changed and now I am at a point where out of the VIASS and the VIS500 I choose the VIS500 for rifle use. I just hope that EcoAims will continue to build on what they have now to continue making improvements to overcome the few remaining issues.

I cant explain the bad shots

Firstly I must say sorry to those of you who don't like word play or those who do not natively speak English, but I just couldn't resist it in the title.

Recently we had been noticing that when I am shooting that I would have a string of good shots, a bad shot being considered an 8 on the air rifle target, but then I would just get a random 6 or 5 on its own and the good shots resuming afterwards. What was most concerning was that those random 6s or 5s actually sounded fairly reasonable. So it was time to do some experimenting to find out what was going on.

One thought was that may be the equipment was doing something strange, may be the EcoAims VIS500 was walking. So to test this I spent an evening at the shooting club sitting down with the rifle on a support rest and the computer connected to the EcoAims VIS500. I did live firing so we could compare where the VIS500 claimed the shot went and where the MegaLink target scored the shot. After around 80 shots, no fliers in the 6 ring and both the EcoAims software and the MegaLink were in fairly close agreement. So seems like its not the equipment, unfortunately that means I was doing something.

One concern I have had for some time with the IR LED based systems like the VIS500 and the VIASS is how the IR LED is offset from the target. The problem with this is that if the rifle is canted over by differing amounts then this might affect where the shot goes. To test if this could account for the random fliers I was getting, it was time to cant over the rifle on the support stand and fire a few shots and see what happens. The original plan was to try 10 shots canted one way then 10 with another cant, however it became very clear sooner this could be the problem. The only thing to notice is that if you mount the IR LED above the target, then the shot goes the other way to wat you might normally expect from canting the rifle. Remember normally because of the path of a pellet dropping over the 10m the barrel is pointing above what you are looking at through the sights, but with the VIS500 it is looking at the IR LED which will be above where the barrel is pointing.

Unfortunately this seems to be a design problem of the IR based systems, with a single LED they cannot see the cant and cannot account for it. Also the further the LED is from the center of the target, the larger the affect from canting the rifle will be, I just hope that WSPS have sufficient wisdom to not standardise the placement too far from the target center.

So looks like we now know what I need to train, detecting and reducing the variation in the cant of the rifle.

Home training

With the holiday period over the last week the chances to get to the shooting club were going to be limited so I was given some home work and sent home with my rifle to do some dry-fire training. Whilst in the past I have taken the rifle home to do some trigger training to improve my trigger technique, this was the first time I was going to try and use the EcoAims VIS500 in training mode at home.

Fortunately my house is about 10m from the very front wall to the very back wall and there is a straight path between them, so this seemed the perfect placement for dry-fire training at home. OK, I will be aiming over a slightly shorter distance as I need a bit of space for me, but it probably is still more than 8m between the IR LED and the EcoAims scope.

As the aim of this exercise was so that I could learn about the sound of the EcoAims VIS500 and also have the opportunity to experiment with the various settings, I decided to make the task slightly easier by sitting with the rifle resting on a support. Good job I did as I have not yet fully worked out the placement of everything and a reliable way for me to align myself with the LED, and there have been some minutes of just searching around to get the target sound. Once I located the target I normally was able to keep finding it for the rest of that training session. Standing though could have been quite a challenge and probably will not happen until we have designed some foot templates to assist me in aligning myself correctly.

This probably was the first time I ever really spent much time with the EcoAims training software. It may be due to it being my first time with it and needing to learn how it works, but I just get the feeling that what I was able to do was very limited. Part of this may be due to the fact that a good amount of the software is not accessible to my screen reader, so there definitely are features I cannot access.

It was good that whilst I was doing my dry-fire training that the software was speaking out a score when the trigger is pulled. Whilst it gives me an indication of whether what I thought I heard was really correct, one needs to remember these are not scoring devices, the slightly shorter range and the fact the VIS500 does not account for cant both would lead to inaccuracies in scoring. The first problem I noticed was that if using my usual headphones which block out some background noise combined with the fact that one tries to continue to hold the same position for a second or two after firing, I normally could not hear the score being spoken over the sound of the VIS500. Changing to a lighter weight set of headphones which block less noise did help. I am not sure if there is a keypress so that one could have the score repeated. Another solution would be if the software had a setting to delay the speaking of scores by a few seconds, giving the shooter the chance to come off target first.

As well as being able to know what the last score was, it would be useful if I had a way to go back through a number of shots and review the whole session. This would be particularly useful when trying out something new and comparing it to before making the change. This might be possible with the software, but due to the lack of accessibility with a screen reader I could not find out how to get this information. Again may be there is a key press and the software may self voice this information.

Knowing scores is only a small part of what one needs to know when training and trying to improve shooting, it is also useful to have the trace showing how the rifle was moving throughout the aiming process. Now I did find a replay option in the menu, but again due to the lack of screen reader accessibility I am unsure exactly how this works and if I could make use of it independently. This is one thing Scatt does have, the audio output mode which allows its trace to be played in sound. In fact at some point I am going to be given some of my Scatt traces and some of a sighted shooter so I can compare how they sound, something which would not be possible without the audio playback feature of Scatt.

So in summary, it is great to have a way of dry-fire training at home and to get some sort of indication of the quality of the shot from the computer, the software to me as a VI shooter trying to use it independently feels very limited and probably at this point is no where near what Scatt is as a training tool. However the EcoAims software is free with the VIS500 scope, where as it would cost quite a bit for a Scatt MX02. It is software, so may be over time EcoAims could provide updates and possibly could look at resolving some of these issues. Also if we compare this with what one previously had with the Swarovski, IE. no estimation of score, this is definitely a step forward already for doing home training for VI shooters.