Speaking of reliability, what pushed me over the edge to buy one was that I couldn’t get the LabRadar to reliably measure muzzleloader shots. I don’t know whether it was the big cloud of white smoke, or a discarding sabot, or the cloth patch that confused the LabRadar, but my capture rate of muzzleloader shots with the LabRadar was 50% or less. At such a decent price, why not try the Athlon? After maybe 50 black powder shots fired, I only failed to get a reading on two shots with the Athlon Rangecraft Velocity Pro.

The user interface consists of the screen and five buttons. On top, there are three buttons. From left to right, they are labeled PWR/RTN, OPT/DEL, and OK. On the right side of the unit are two buttons with up and down arrows for menu selection. The left side of the unit has a rubber flap that protects the USB-C port that is used for charging.

To power on the unit, you press and hold the power button for about 3 seconds. You are then presented with the previously mentioned screen that shows where you need to place the unit with respect to the firearm. To move on, you must press the OK button.

You are then shown the main menu with four options: - Quick Start Session - New Session - Previous Session - Settings

If you choose Quick Start, you next must choose from Rifle, Pistol, Archery, or Air Gun so that the radar knows what velocity range to expect. Actually, the next screen gives you one more choice to select a velocity range. Strangely, it doesn’t make a difference whether you choose Rifle or Pistol, you still need to choose either 600 to 1800 fps, or 1800 to 5000 fps.

With the next screen, the Rangecraft is ready to capture velocities. So it is relatively quick to get going, and the menu structure is fairly simple to understand. The only difference between Quick Start Session and New Session is that if you choose New Session, you will have one extra step to set the weight of the projectile. Knowing the projectile weight, the unit can calculate power factor and kinetic energy for you. Even if you pick Quick Start, you can later go back and edit projectile weight for that session and it will recalculate PF and KE.

Using the Previous Session menu option, you can go back and review any shot series. Statistics calculated for a session include average, minimum, and maximum velocities, standard deviation, extreme spread, kinetic energy and power factor. You can even look at the shot record to read the velocity for each individual shot, and its deviation from the average. It’s easy to delete individual shots, or entire shot strings (sessions).

Athlon provides a ballistic app that can pair your phone to the Rangecraft through Bluetooth and sync all the information generated. Unfortunately, I was unable to successfully pair either my Android phone or Android tablet using the app, so I was relegated to paper and pencil to transcribe the Previous Session data to save it off the device.

Very nice molded carry case. Fits easily in a range bag.

The unit can record up to 50 sessions with up to 100 shots per session. Each session is date and time stamped as to when it was started. That’s a pretty deep memory. Sessions are not forgotten through power-off, so you can always go back and review your data. But to really know what you are looking at when you go back later, you will have to write yourself notes as to what gun, what load, etc., you were firing at a particular time stamp.

I understand that Athlon is diligently working to improve both the firmware and the app to make things work better. But another problem is that the firmware gets updated through the app. If you can’t connect your phone to the Rangecraft in the first place, then you can’t update the firmware. Hmm.

I had a very similar problem with the early version of the LabRadar app. In time, LabRadar came out with basically an entirely new version of their app that worked pretty good for me. Let’s see if Athlon can ultimately get there with software and firmware that works together reliably.

The probable issue is that my phone and tablet are older versions. Eventually I'll get a new phone, because that's how things go, and I will probably be able to get my phone and the Athlon to talk to each other then.

Though it has a USB cable for charging, you can’t pull data into your computer through that interface. Sad. If it had a removable MicroSD card, that would be another welcome data transfer method that unfortunately it lacks.

There are still things that the LabRadar can do that the Athlon Rangecraft cannot. The Athlon measures one thing: muzzle velocity. It probably measures downrange velocities internally to calculate MV, but the user has no access to that data. And that’s OK, because that’s all that most shooters want from a chronograph.

But by accessing the deep data that the LabRadar generates and provides, you can see the velocity data for approximately every 3 feet as a projectile flies downrange. You can offload this data into your computer for deeper analysis. You can chart the downrange velocity degradation and calculate your own ballistic coefficient. I’ve done this and found some discrepancy between my data and the bullet maker’s claimed B.C.

The Athlon app is a more comprehensive ballistic app than merely an interface to the chronograph. It has bullet libraries and can calculate your trajectory based on the manufacturer’s B.C. and your measured average velocity. If you have an Athlon scope, it has a library of Athlon reticles, so it can then calculate ballistic drops and/or come-ups based on your particular scope. There’s a lot of promise there that I hope to someday be able to take advantage of.