09/01/2026
From our Friends at Redwood Gun Club North of Eureka CA. The match should be dated Aug 23.
Hi Nathan,
Well, our first official CMP match on Shotmarkers is in the books!
I made some pretty embarrassing mistakes.
I hated to write numbers on the faces of our shiny new transmitters, so I wrote tiny numbers on the back side. We have no pits and some pretty bad shooters, so I designed a block of wood and bracket to mount the transmitters perpendicular to the range, cutting the area of potential hit by half. I mounted them on the existing 2x6 rails carrying the range target backers between our new frames and I covered them with a 3x3x 6" angle iron deflector welded to a 1/2" rebar stake driven into the sand. When I was setting up the targets I inadvertently crossed target 9 & 10's transmitter. fortunately, or UNFORTUNATELY depending on point of view, I was on target 9. I was accusing Tom on T-10 of crossfiring on my target and he likewise! Alan, our IT guru and match director was busy working through his first match with multiple targets, plus we are taking turns running different relays so we can both shoot, total confusion! We thought the targets were picking up each other's mikes, not thinking of the crossed transmitters! We manually went down range to score until I finally figured out the dummy that crossed the transmitters! The confusion did not do my standing score any favors!
Once Rapid Prone was over and everything wired correctly, things mellowed out! Slow Prone worked well, with 2 shots off call. I had a high 8 and a high 9 in nearly the same area. Both were clearly x ring holds. Now I am concerned about the kinetic bullet puller effect of jamming the bullet into the lands when slamming the bolt home on an AR platform. I was shooting my 6 AR Match rifle using .002" neck tension with about .005" off the lands.
Have you played with distance off lands for accuracy in a gas gun?
Anyway, over all the Shotmarkers were a learning curve for all, but will be awesome from here forward!
Here are our scores: I just saw your Milvale scores. You have some pretty good shooters! Sets the bar for all of us to shoot for! I see we both tied in x count! Good shooting! Looks like we both need to work on our Standing scores! Take care, Sid
