Every carry number in golf is a projection. A radar measures the ball while it is close enough to be seen, then a physics model finishes the sentence. That is true of every launch monitor ever sold. The difference is whether it tells you where the measurement stopped, and whether anything has actually measured the wind it is projecting through.
A radar behind the tee sees the ball for as long as the ball is within range of it. For a driver that is roughly the first quarter of the flight. In that window the ball speed comes straight out of the Doppler shift and the launch angle out of the geometry, and those are measurements. Everything after it, carry, apex, landing, comes out of a model that takes the launch conditions and integrates forward. That model is good. It is not a measurement, and it is only as good as its assumption about the air the ball is flying through.
Ball speed, launch angle, launch direction and club speed, in the window where the ball is inside the beam. Directly, with nothing in the ball and nothing on the player.
Carry, total, apex and landing angle. Integrated forward from the launch conditions through an aerodynamic model. Honest to about ±4.6 m in still air. design
Five metres per second of unknown wind moves a driver carry by roughly sixteen metres. No launch monitor can measure that from the strike alone, because the wind has barely touched the ball yet.
Shots that are seen at launch and again at landing hand you the wind for free. With enough shots through a hole, the projection stops guessing at the air and starts using a measured one.
A sensor sits behind the tee. Pick a club and watch the ball go. The gold part of the trace is measured. Where it turns grey, the ball has left the detection envelope and what you are looking at is a projection. Then move the wind slider, which is the part nobody shows you: it does not change the measurement at all, and it moves the answer a very long way.
This is the part of the category that gets oversold, so here is the physics. Detection range against a golf ball at 24 GHz is about 74 metres from one sensor under fixed power. A par four is five times that. Anybody promising a whole hole from one box is either quoting a different object or a different frequency band. Coverage comes from several sensors and a layer that fuses them into one track, and building synchronised multi radar systems is precisely the heritage this team comes out of. The grid is not a workaround. It is the product.
One behind the tee looking down the line, one behind the green looking back. The two shots that matter most, the drive and the approach, are measured from the ends where a mast can physically stand. Nothing goes in the middle of a fairway.
It is also the shot radar is unambiguously best at: the ball leaves straight down the sensor's line of sight, at full speed, with clean geometry. Every drive on the course, measured, is a stronger starting point than partial coverage of everything.
On the simulated par four beside this text, two sensors measure the launch of about 45 % of all shots played, and four measure essentially all of them. Past four the curve flattens. That matches our own course modelling, which lands at roughly three to four sensors per hole. It is a smaller number than the category usually implies, and we would rather you heard it from us.
Every shot seen at both launch and landing measures the wind over that hole. Two hundred rounds a day is not noise, it is a live wind field that sharpens every projection on the course.
The system exports through an API and files your existing tools can read, and TruGolf is our development partner on the software side. How data is shared and who may use what is written into the agreement with the club, not assumed by us.
The same sensor and the same fusion layer. What changes is how many and where.
Bays are the easy case: the ball leaves from a known spot, straight down the sensor's line, and the player is already identified by the bay they stand in.
Sensors at the ends of each hole, fused into one picture. Start with the tees, add density where the value is, and let the fully tracked shots measure the wind.
Short range and a known geometry make this the most forgiving installation of the three. The projection is also at its most accurate here, because indoors there is no wind to guess at.
You have been handed golf numbers before without ever being told which of them was measured. That is the thing we are changing. When your drive says 268, you will be able to see that the speed and the launch were measured, that the distance was projected, and how much of the margin was the wind. It is a smaller promise than the category usually makes, and it is one that survives being checked.
Ball speed, launch angle, launch direction and club speed, from the window where the ball was in the beam. Nothing in the ball, nothing clipped to your glove, nothing to switch on.
Carry and total with the margin shown, and the wind that went into it. Indoors the margin is small. Into a gusting crosswind it is not, and you will see that instead of being told a number with false confidence.
Every measured strike, at the range and on the course, in one profile. Trends built on measurements rather than on estimates that quietly changed method between sessions.
It will not read your spin, and it will not follow your putt. Both are in the section below, stated plainly, because a system you can trust on the tee is one that admits where it stops.
These are the figures the prototype is being built against. None of them has been measured at a golf venue yet, and the campaign that changes that is dated in the next section. Until then they carry their class, and so does everything else on this site.
To a golf ball at 24 GHz: mobile power, fixed power, and fixed power against a higher reflectivity ball. Calculated from the link budget. A second band is in development for the long range case.
Set by the chirp bandwidth. This is how finely the sensor separates two objects in depth. It is not a position accuracy figure, and it is the number that makes centimetre claims in this category impossible to take seriously.
Ball speed and launch angle. Carry projected to about ±4.6 m in still air, degrading with unknown wind exactly as the slider above shows.
A Doppler sensor cannot separate something moving slower than this from the ground behind it. A putt travels at one to three metres per second, which puts the green outside the physics. We do not sell around that.
Certified velocity measurement on objects from 30 to 10,000 m/s. This is the affiliate instrumentation heritage the team builds on, not a specification of the golf product.
No centimetre precision. No validated spin: the spin sideband sits roughly 20 dB below the ball return, which puts its useful range at about a third of the ball's, and we have never measured it. No putting. No CE or FCC certification yet. No measured accuracy from a live venue.
The measurement chain runs on development hardware, and the aerodynamic model behind every projection on this page is built on decades of Doppler instrumentation from the affiliate we come out of.
Radar cross section and launch dynamics measured against instrumentation grade reference radars. This is what turns the design targets above into measured ones, or moves them.
A prototype measuring the vital parameters, in the enclosure it will ship in, at the industry's main annual gathering.
CE and FCC, then the first instrumented venues running alongside whatever they already have, scored head to head rather than described.
Range, course and indoors on the same sensor and the same fusion layer.
A 60 minute technical session: your course or your range, our physics, and a walk through what we would measure, what we would project, and what we would not promise.
Request a technical sessionOle Kjærgaard Schrøter · Alpha Vision · oks@weibelventures.com · +45 20 97 56 20