Video Transcript
I've got the Garmin Xero C1 Pro Chronograph. Zero, however you wanna pronounce it. And what this is a high-tech, highly advanced chronographic device. Now, why should you consider owning something like this? Well, if you wanna start building dope cards and doing precision shooting of some sort, one of the most important things that you need to know about your rifle is how fast the bullets are coming out of it. Now, a lot of ammunition out there, no, not everything, has a muzzle velocity printed on the backside of the box. But what you will find is this is more of sort of a suggestion. This was something that they were able to test on a certain barrel length in a certain type of condition.
And so they print that on the box and it's close-ish maybe to accurate to a similar rifle with the same barrel length, but it's not going to be fully accurate to your particular rifle. The way to figure out the muzzle velocity on your particular weapon is to have something like this and also to true your rifle at a particular distance and then calibrate the muzzle velocity based on where you're actually hitting on the target. That's a whole other conversation. This device, however, you can use to figure out how fast bullets are coming out of the barrel. And then you can plug that into your ballistic computers such as your test roll. You can put it into an app to build a gun profile and then you can build your dope cards off of more accurate information once it's been ballistically calculated. That's a word.
Using some sort of calculator. So what's inside the box, it's pretty simple. Got a little tripod that the Garmin is going to sit on. The Garmin device itself. Instructions, which you can choose to read or not. And a charging cable. This is a device that does not have an external or a removable battery such as a CR123 or AA. So you are going to have to plug this into a computer or into a wall outlet of some sort every once in a while to charge it. I've had one of these now for, I want to say about six months and I haven't even charged it yet. And I've used it many times. So it does last pretty long.
Out of the box, this device will have some battery in it. So you should be able to turn it on. And immediately I can create a session. I can go down into settings, which I, the only reason to do that is if you want to change your units from two per second to something else. You can change the display color to white instead of black. Backlight, you can make it brighter. If you need to, set on 50% by default, that's pretty good. There's a timeout for the backlight. That's cool. English, you know, you don't want to change language. Connectivity, you can Bluetooth this to other devices, such as your phone.
I have had zero reason to do that. And so that is that. So the power button also serves as a back button. You go back and we're going to go straight into new session. Now they sell this as an archery device. Yes, you can use this for archery, but this is totally for rifles and handguns, but we're primarily using it for rifle. So you select on rifle, you can select between two different feet per seconds, seconds is that you're going to be shooting in every rifle is going to be 1700 to 5000. So we just hit that, boom, enter the weight of your projectile, get accurate kinetic energy values. I'm going to say yes, actually, we're going to do that. And then I'm going to toggle, which you need 77.
So you need to go up to seven, and then you place it, and this is kind of confusing. They have this little graph showing a bolt action rifle, some sort of an accuracy international, and they want it 5-15 inches away from the barrel. And they want it 5-15 inches from the muzzle. So like away from you. So not right at the muzzle device. I've actually been shooting this in front and it's worked, but we're going to do what it says here on the graph. We're going to do just five across and five back.
I also want this aimed towards the target. So down range. And at the target, we're good movement detected. It stops tracking while you're moving around, not set. I want to have 10 rounds of ammunition, the ammunition that I want to be chronoing in the rifle. Four more, but I only need 10. This is expensive ammo. It's MK 262, Black Hills.
And normally when you're chronoing, you want to fire 10 to have a good sample set, particularly more. And you want to fire it in somewhat rapid succession. We're not firing a shot, waiting 10, 20 seconds and letting everything cool off. We're giving a couple seconds per. And the nice thing with this device is it kind of makes you wait that long.
It has a little like reading counter. So I'm usually glancing over the rifle, looking at it. And as soon as he gives me my shots data, I fire another one. It processes that one. As soon as it presents, I fire another one. And that gives me, you know, two seconds between every shot and we'll be good to go. So now I have 10 shots fired on the Garmin and it was picking up so that the distance with the barrel and everything worked out. Some of the other Chronos that I've used are super, super picky how they're set up on the gun.
And this one, the reason this one is just so popular, it's just so easy and fast to use, especially if you're Chronoing a lot of different guns. You literally just set it down. I just bring all my different rifles to your fire 10, take a photo of it, log it, I'm good to go.
So now I hit on the power button and it gives me, I could do a shot list, I could see the session summary. I wanna see the session summary. And this is going to tell me that if I had 10 shots, my minimum, two per second was 2648.8, my average was 2669.9, so that's what I'm ultimately gonna put into my ballistic computer. I'll put, I'll round up, I'll do 2670, my max is 2682 for an extended spread of 33.3 with a standard deviation of 11.5. So what that means is if I am shooting a target, obviously here it doesn't matter, say at 500 or so, within this box of ammunition, I'm going to have a standard deviation of feet per second spread of 11.
Which means I could dial for a shot at 500 and just do, I could have a round that is slower than say the round I just shot before by a little bit, and that could affect my impact on target. 500 meters with a standard deviation of 11.5 is probably not gonna be an issue, but going out to 1000 starts to be a problem. What you wanna look for is ammunition that is both accurate in your rifle, of an acceptable MOA, whatever it happens to be, and also has a standard deviation spread as little as possible.
I've had some ammo, like the Federal Premium Match ammo, that'll be like seven, six, and there's guys who hand load to get it down to two or three. So 11 with this MK 262 out of this gun is not bad, it's probably acceptable for what I'm gonna be using this gun for, you just wanna get it as low as possible. So now what I'm going to do, and this is a perfect example of this ammunition, this Black Hill 77 grain MK 262, they say on their side is 2750 feet per second from muzzle out of a 20 inch gun. This is a 16 inch gun, and my average is 2670, so I am off by 80 feet per second, which will make a pretty big difference.
This is why you wanna chrono your guns and actually figure out what's going on, versus say just going off of boxed data, like on the 65 Creedmoor ammo I have, that is going to be 2675, but out of my rifle in there it's like 2580, something like that. So now that I have this information right here, I can take a photo, which I like to do, and I recommend with the actual rifle and the box of ammunition, and because my phone will save like dates and all that.
And then I could go into my gun profile and I can actually drop in my average of 2670, and then I can actually start to bolt a dope card off of that. The reason you would wanna re-crono a gun is if you change ammunitions, or it can even get as granular as you get a different batch of ammunition that's from a different lot. And that's when it gets super nerdy, but you're actually chronoing every lot.
But anyway, that is overall how the Garmin Xero C1 Pro works, it's an excellent device, it is a little bit costly. My recommendation is if you have a clan of shooting buddies, figure out if someone's planning on buying one, or maybe as a group you buy one, and then you all just kinda use it. It is sort of a, I see this as like a squad device, not necessarily a device that every single person is going to have, although that's very cool if you can do that. But if you've got one person with it, and you're just like, hey, we're going to the range, can I use your chrono? I need to get some data on some ammo and some different rifles, you're good to go.
So I see this as more of a squad device than an individual, every single person has a device. But I'm really thankful that Garmin made this because it made my life super, much easier, I should say, of being able to chrono that fast and not having to attach things to the gun, to the suppressor, to the barrel, setting up weird stuff. There are people that are attaching these to their rifles, which I find really interesting, because they want to see their feet per second all the time. And I'm just not that nerdy, and most of you probably aren't either. If you have any other questions about this device, you can always email us at team@trex-arms.com.