McHenry Sportsman’s Club Newsletter (August 3, 2001)
Dear Members and Families:
It has been some time since the last newsletter was published.
The Annual Club Family Picnic:
We are planning a picnic for our members and their families this year, just as it has been done from the beginning.
Please mark your calendars.
This year the picnic is on August 26, (the last Sunday of the month), on the club's grounds.
The picnic is an excellent time for members and their families to meet each other.
This year in particular we have had quite a few new members.
Family members can also see the club and see what exactly does go on which draws people there in some cases each week.
Additionally, if you have not renewed your membership, this is a good time to do so.
Currently, we are still on an annual membership where all memberships renew during the month of January.
Because the picnic logically occurs halfway through the year, new memberships and membership renewals that occur at the picnic (or later) are still at one half the normal annual price.
The Eating:
There will be plenty of eating at the picnic, and it is cheap.
Tickets are five dollars if you are coming alone, or ten dollars for a family.
This includes all the food and soft drinks you can possibly consume.
The food we will be cooking for all of you this year will include Hamburgers, Brats, Vienna Hot Dogs and Chicken, all cooked right on our grounds.
Someone is looking into roasting a pig, but nothing on the pig has been firmed up yet.
If it is there… great, if it is not there, it will still be great.
Bringing a dish to pass would be appreciated, and it would serve as a platform to show off your (or your spouse's) creative culinary talents.
The Shooting:
Like all clubs, we always have to figure out who the club champion is.
At McHenry, this is carried out at the picnic.
The shooting events that will be held this year at the picnic include the following:
- Fifty targets from the sixteen-yard line.
- The Louis Pitzen Handicap.
Fifty targets from your handicap yardage.
Your yardage is the greater of your ATA handicap yardage, or one half of the total score you received while shooting the sixteen-yard event.
- Twenty-five pairs of doubles.
- Practice shooting and time permitting, Annie Oakley events for those interested.
- Instructional assistance will also be available for people who are new, or just want help becoming better shooters.
- Cost for shooting is ten dollars per event, or twenty-five dollars for all three events.
This cost is used to purchase prizes for the winners and pay the cost of targets and trap help.
Prizes this year are Belt Buckles and Bracelets.
We did this last year and all the winners seemed to really like the prizes.
Practice shoots will be available at normal prices and instructional shooting will be provided for members or family members that want to learn how to shoot.
Instructional assistance is offered at no charge.
We always want to play shooting games, such as Annie Oakleys, but it seems that the normal shoot program takes too long.
We can speed this up if we start it early and organize the event so people that have signed up are ready to shoot when it is their turn.
If you are not shooting, or shooting and just want to help out, we can always use your help in organizing things at the picnic.
The club will open around nine in the morning with the sixteen yard shooting event starting as soon as we get enough people signed up.
The 'eating' (business) part of the picnic starts around noon.
If you plan to shoot the events, plan to arrive as early as possible.
The Raffle:
Remember all those shooting coupons you used to pay for your rounds?
You may have noticed each one had a unique number printed on it and the last coupon was white.
We saved the white tickets you presented to the club, and they will be used in a raffle during the picnic.
The prizes are still unknown at this time, but they will include additional shooting coupon books.
Other important stuff
Counter situation
This is getting real old. We need help at the counter and we are not getting it.
The biggest problem is getting the club open on time and doing so on every day we are open.
The club is authorized to open at 12:00 PM and stay open until 5:00 PM every Saturday and Sunday (unless otherwise specified).
When the club's opening is delayed, people arrive and have to wait for things to get setup and functioning.
After several visits, they simply assume the club really does not open until 1:00 PM.
Thus we loose an entire hour of shooting opportunity.
Many of the members have said they would help, but need to be called.
Someone has to take on the responsibility of coordinating this effort.
Perhaps we need to hire someone to perform this task, or to actually run the counter.
The directors have already approved this type of action.
The best thing that could happen is someone's spouse may want to do this, or a group of several people who can schedule the activity among themselves.
This is good because the person can make a couple of bucks, and if desired can learn how to shoot.
The job is not difficult, although it may appear that way because of the manner which we are executing the responsibility at present.
If anyone has suggestions or is willing to help out, please let us know.
Our new Pat Trap:
The club did purchase a Pat Trap and it was installed in trap house one during the early spring.
This machine is capable of normal regulation singles trapshooting, doubles trapshooting, and wobble trapshooting.
Wobble appears to be a big hit for some people.
In a nutshell, the targets can be adjusted to go just about anywhere left/right and up/down in a totally random fashion and at very rapid speeds.
You are suppose to shoot this with six people and you also get a second shot at the target if you miss it on the first shot.
Most of us shoot it with out singles trap guns and if we miss, we miss.
The game makes you concentrate on the target location more than normal singles trapshooting.
There is very little downtime with this machine, and it holds enough targets for four rounds.
We are looking into purchasing another one and installing it this coming spring.
We really want to see how the machine holds up in the wintertime.
The machine is hydraulic.
The only thing electricity is used for is running the hydraulic fluid pump and controlling target trajectories.
We have to see what (if anything) has to be done to allow the machine to properly function in cold weather.
By the way, with our new Pat Trap, this means we have automatic machines on all five trap fields.
Voice call information:
We have also purchased a fourth voice call unit.
This equipment works great when it is working.
It appears the more you use them the more problems you have.
We are still gaining knowledge on what exactly you have to do to keep them fully operational.
This 'experimentation' is still going on and will probably be completed by spring.
We have made a critical discovery relating to 'deaf speakers' which will require a change to the unit itself.
We will make this change and review the results before upgrading other units.
Things are better now than during the spring and early summer.
Most of the time this equipment works properly.
Once we get the rest of this nailed down, you can expect perfect pulls the vast majority of the time.
As users of this equipment, we can pass down some information that will help you at McHenry (as well as other clubs).
The "speakers" are just that.
Real outdoor horn type speakers, which normally are used to convert electrical energy into sound waves normally used as part of small public address systems.
The main difference in principle between a speaker and a microphone is the speaker radiates sound where the microphone collects sound.
To radiate sound, voltage is applied to the speaker and the speaker converts the electrical energy into sound energy.
A microphone uses the sound energy to produce a very small amount of electrical energy, which is made useful by signal amplification.
The speakers on a voice call system are being used as microphones.
They collect sound energy (your "PULL"), and feed this into an "amplifier" which activates the release of targets.
We can get away with using speakers as microphones because we really do not care about the quality of the voice (like you would in recording or Public Address), only that it can be detected to release a target.
There are NO adjustments that can be made.
You cannot adjust anything.
This includes time delay or sensitivity.
If someone tells you that they have "adjusted" their voice call system, they can only be referring to speaker placement.
The speakers are very sensitive.
You do not have to have one in your face.
The best location is directly in front of the shooter three feet up field.
The best angle for the speaker is pointing to your upper chest.
Noises made by your gun (such as sliding a pump or chambering a round in a semi-automatic) can activate a false PULL.
There is a time interval where target activation is suppressed.
This interval exists on both the voice release system and the trap machine that it is connected to.
The time interval can be anywhere from two to four seconds on the voice call system (depending on when it was made).
On the trap machine, it is the time it takes to cycle the machine to its ready status position.
Because of these time intervals, and outside noises which the voice caller thinks is you requesting a target, you can get into a situation where you get "delayed" pulls or no bird at all.
I can tell you this and I know because I have been inside these units.
There is a very slight built in automatic "delay" from when the voice caller first "hears" the PULL cry until it sends its signal to the trap machine for target deployment.
This is not an engineering defect, but a very carefully thought out feature.
The voice caller is attempting to emulate a human function.
The best trap puller in the world would also introduce a similar delay.
He or she hears the call, presses the button and the machine fires a target.
There is time involved.
To eliminate fast pulls, that same delay is built into the voice callers and for sake of discussion, we will consider this to be a constant.
When using a voice caller, it should appear as if a very good puller is working for you, giving you very consistent pulls.
Anything else is a problem and usually caused by one or more of the following:
Bad timing, both the voice call unit and the trap machine must be ready to activate.
Assume four seconds to be safe.
It may be less than that, but four seconds appears to always work.
Some sort of noise was detected between the previous shooter's shot and your pull (like you closing or chambering your gun).
If the voice call unit was ready, it will request a target and RESET itself for another interval.
If the trap machine was ready, it will fire a wasted target.
If it was not, nothing happens.
You cry PULL and the voice caller is still waiting out its interval based on the unseen false pull (like it is suppose to).
It thought the "noise" was someone asking for a target.
It has no way to know the difference (at least using current technology).
What you can do to make voice callers work better for you:
Avoid moving them around.
Place them where they belong and leave them there.
If you appear to get slow or missing pulls, wait four seconds
from the time the last person shot until you call PULL.
Chamber your gun within two seconds after the last person shot or
do so quietly.
Try to shoot handicap on fields where the equipment is already in
place for such activity.
If something appears to be wrong, note the field you were on, and which equipment you are using and report it immediately.
When calling for a target, use a good clean robust cry.
You do not have to yell.
Long soft calls are unpredictable even with human pullers.
Develop a cry that is useful for target release and does not cause you to flinch.
Be careful of cabling laying on the field.
Two things can happen if you trip or drag cables.
For one thing you can get hurt.
Secondly, the connectors are already bad, by pulling on wires, they get worse and worse.
GOOD SHOOTING TO ALL
Sincerely,
Tom Carneal, Club Treasurer