Dry-fire analysis · 10 m air pistol
Your hold is measured in millimetres. So is everything else.
An iPhone on a tripod, watching what your hands actually did — the hold before the shot, the trigger break, the follow-through.
the ten-ring at 10 metres — 1.15 milliradians
That number is why this app measures your position rather than guessing your score. Here's what that means.
drawn to scale · 155.5 mm across
What it measures
Four numbers that change between a good shot and a bad one
In dry fire there is no pellet, so there is nothing to score. What there is — and what separates a 560 from a 520 — is what the hand and the trigger did. That is measurable, and it is measurable well.
break disturbance
What the trigger did
Muzzle movement in the 150 ms after the sear releases, with the direction on a clock face. Trigger technique with the aim removed — the single most diagnostic number in dry fire.
hold RMS · wobble area
How still you were
The two seconds before the break, as an RMS radius and a 95% area. A good shooter's tremor is 2–6 mm; the rig resolves well under a millimetre, so it measures the tremor floor, not just the faults.
follow-through
Whether you held it
How far the muzzle drifted after the shot and how long it took to come back. Positions that collapse the instant the trigger goes show up here and nowhere else.
trigger isolation
Whether the whole hand squeezed
Index-to-middle fingertip separation, compared between the hold and the break. When it collapses at release, you gripped instead of pressing.
cant drift
Roll, against your own zero
Pistol roll relative to the upright you calibrated, not an abstract ideal. Drift across a string is usually the support side quietly fatiguing.
head reference
Where your head was
Drift from the head position you set your zero at. One millimetre of eye movement is 24 mm downrange at 10 m — most of the way out of the nine.
A ten-ring subtends 1.15 milliradians. Placing a shot inside it means knowing where the muzzle pointed to roughly half that — about 0.03 degrees. A camera beside you, estimating the orientation of a 200 mm object a metre away, gets somewhere between 0.5 and 2 degrees. That is one to two orders of magnitude short, and it is geometry, not something a better model fixes.
So SightMetric measures muzzle movement at the shooter, in millimetres, and never converts it into a ring value. Every figure in the app is labelled that way. If you want a scoring trace, you want an optical system mounted on the gun — a different instrument, and an honest one to own alongside this.
The rig
A specification, not a preference
Every millimetre the app reports is derived from the distance between the lens and your muzzle. Move the tripod four inches and last week's numbers stop being comparable to this week's. So the geometry is fixed, written down, and checked by the phone with LiDAR before each series — it will tell you it is six centimetres out, which you would never see by eye.
| Lens height | your muzzle height + 6 cm | Measured in your stance, aiming at a real target — not the target's height. Muzzle height runs from about 1.33 m for a 5'4" shooter to 1.54 m at 6'2". |
|---|---|---|
| Standoff | 0.91 m · 36 in | Frames head to muzzle at 0.64 mm per pixel. Closer stops fitting; further gives up the resolution that makes the hold numbers mean anything. |
| Position | 45° quartering | A camera cannot see movement along its own axis. Side-on measures none of your left-right wobble; 45° captures 71% of both. |
| Tolerance | ±5 cm | Five centimetres shifts the scale 5.5% — the same order as the effect being measured. |
Gear
Four things, and one of them has a catch
Nothing here is exotic. The one specification that trips people up is tripod height: it has to reach your camera height at the phone mount, not at the leg apex. A 6'2" shooter needs 63 inches, and plenty of travel tripods stop near 51.
Tripod with a rigid phone mount
Rigidity matters more than weight — a tripod that sways in a breeze injects movement the app will read as your wobble.
reaches 63 in →Painter's tape
Marks the tripod feet and your feet so the geometry repeats exactly. Lifts clean off a concrete slab.
any width →Mini tape measure
For the one-time muzzle-height measurement, and for re-checking after the tripod has been in the case.
metric + imperial →A case that holds all of it
The rig only stays a specification if it goes back the same way every time.
tripod case →These are category searches, not product endorsements — we link specific gear only once we have shot behind it. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.
Early access
TestFlight, when it's ready to be useful
Version one is a dry-fire coach for 10 m air pistol. If you shoot ISSF pistol and have a tripod, you are exactly who it needs to be tested by — particularly if you can tell us where the numbers disagree with what your coach says.