Which Golf Simulator Is in the Bay You're Booking?

Almost every indoor golf venue advertises its simulator. Very few explain what the difference is, and a fair number do not name the brand at all.

While building our list of 160 indoor golf venues across Canada, we recorded what each one publishes about its own hardware. Here is what is actually in Canadian bays, and what the differences mean when you are standing on the mat.

What is running, by the numbers

Across the 160 venues we checked, by count of venues naming each system:

| System | Venues | | --- | --- | | TrackMan | 57 | | Uneekor | 18 | | Impact Vision | 17 | | GolfZon | 11 | | Foresight | 8 | | HD Golf | 6 | | Full Swing | 5 | | TARGET | 5 | | TruGolf | 3 |

Twenty-three venues do not publish what they run at all. That is not necessarily a red flag — plenty of good rooms just never wrote it down — but it does mean asking before you book if it matters to you.

The one distinction that actually matters

Forget brand loyalty for a moment. The meaningful split is how the system sees the shot.

Radar tracks the ball in flight, the way a Doppler gun tracks a car. It measures what the ball did and works out the rest. TrackMan is the best-known radar system, and it is what tour players and broadcast ball-tracking use.

Cameras photograph the ball and club at the moment of impact, at very high frame rates, and calculate the flight from that. Uneekor, Foresight and GC-series units are camera-based. In a room, cameras have a real advantage: they do not need distance behind the ball to work.

Infrared and optical grids — the systems in a lot of older and budget rooms — read the ball crossing a plane of light. They are cheap and durable. They are also the least precise, and they generally cannot tell you much about the club.

For most golfers, any of the first two will be more accurate than they need. The difference shows up when you care about club data — path, face angle, attack angle — rather than just where the ball went.

What "TrackMan" on a homepage does not tell you

TrackMan is not one product. The units differ, and the generation in the room matters as much as the badge:

• TrackMan 4 is the dual-radar unit built for outdoor ranges and tour use. It works indoors but wants space behind the hitter.
• TrackMan iO is the indoor-optimised unit. It mounts on the ceiling rather than behind you, which is what lets it work in a room the size of a bay, and it tracks club and ball together rather than inferring one from the other.

Of the 57 venues running TrackMan, only 12 specifically name iO. The rest say "TrackMan" and leave it there. If the room is small and the unit is behind you rather than overhead, it is worth asking which one you are getting.

It is also worth asking which bay. Several venues run their best system in a premium room and something else everywhere else, then put the good name on the homepage. That is a legitimate way to run a business — it just means the bay you booked and the bay in the photo may not be the same bay.

Numbers you can trust versus numbers you can compare

A point that gets lost in the brand arguments: consistency matters more than absolute accuracy for most practice.

If you are working on a swing change, what you need is for the same strike to produce the same number every time, so you can see whether the change did anything. Nearly every system on the list above will do that. What you cannot do is compare Tuesday's carry number on one system to Thursday's on another and conclude anything — different systems disagree, particularly on spin.

So: pick a room and stay in it while you are working on something. Change rooms for the courses, not for the practice.

What we run, and why we are telling you

Every Shotgun Golf bay runs TrackMan iO — all 30 bays at all six locations, not a premium tier you pay more for. We are in the table above, in the 57 and in the 12.

That is the reason we published the whole list rather than a page about ourselves: it is a claim you can check against 159 other venues, on the same fields, from the venue's own site. The full list is here, grouped by province and city, and our TrackMan setup is here if you want the detail.