Golf Simulator Not Tracking Shots? 12 Fixes That Actually Work (2026)

You take a full swing, catch it flush, and the screen just sits there showing your last shot. Nothing lands. You do it again, and this time it reads a 12-yard chunk shot that never happened. If that's your evening in the garage right now, you're not alone — "it's not picking up my shots" is far and away the most common message I get after a setup goes home. The good news is that almost none of it is a broken unit. The same handful of causes come up again and again, and you can fix nearly all of them yourself in an evening with a tape measure and a bit of patience.

Below are the 12 things I actually check, roughly in the order I check them. Work top to bottom — the early ones catch the vast majority of cases and take five minutes each.

First, know which kind of launch monitor you own

This is the single most important thing to get straight, because a radar unit and a camera unit fail for completely different reasons and want to sit in completely different places. Get the technology wrong in your head and you'll spend an hour "fixing" something that was never the problem.

Radar units — the FlightScope Mevo Gen2 (£1,199.00) and the Garmin Approach R10 (£421.00) — sit on the floor behind you and watch the ball fly away down the target line. They need roughly 2.4m of clear space behind the ball to see enough of the flight, and they hate anything blocking that view.

Camera (photometric) units — the Foresight GC3, the Garmin Approach® R50 (£4,299) and the Uneekor Eye Mini (£2,999) — sit about 0.6m to the side of the ball and photograph it at impact. They don't care what's behind you; they care intensely about lighting and about the ball being in exactly the right spot.

Sort the ball, the mat and the position (fixes 1–4)

1. Get the ball in the strike zone. This is the number-one culprit, full stop. Every unit has a small window it expects the ball to be in, and being an inch or two out is enough to cause the exact "some shots read, some don't" behaviour that drives people mad. With a camera unit, the ball needs to sit on its designated spot beside the unit; with a radar unit, it's about the gap between the ball and the unit behind you. Mark the spot on your mat with a coin or an alignment dot and stop guessing.

2. Check the distance behind the ball (radar only). If you're on a Mevo Gen2 or an R10 and it reads driver fine but goes deaf on wedges, nine times out of ten it's placement — the unit has been nudged forward, or you've crept closer to the screen. Put a strip of tape on the floor for the unit and another for your stance and it stops happening.

3. Look at the mat. A mat with flattened, tired fibres presents the ball too low and throws the detection window off. If you can see the backing through the turf where you actually hit from, it's done. A dense, springy surface keeps the ball at a consistent height shot after shot — I run through the options in our hitting mats collection, and a decent mat solves more "tracking" complaints than people expect.

4. Use the right ball. Scuffed range balls and yellowed old practice balls give camera units a hard time. A clean, white, decent-quality ball reads best. And if your unit uses metallic-dot or marked balls, the dot has to face the camera the way the manufacturer specifies — a wrongly-oriented dot is a genuinely common cause of ghost readings that's dead easy to miss.

Fix the light and the reflections (fixes 5–6)

5. Even out your lighting (camera units). Photometric units photograph the ball in a fraction of a second, so they need steady, even light. The classic UK failure is a garage with one bright strip light throwing hard shadows, or a window whose daylight changes through the session so it reads great at 2pm and terribly at 5pm. Diffused overhead LED, positioned to kill shadows around the hitting area, is what you're after. Don't put a light source directly behind or beside the unit either — glare on the lens will do you no favours.

6. Kill the reflections. Bare concrete, glossy floor paint and shiny enclosure frames all bounce light back into the sensors. Loads of UK garages have a surprisingly reflective floor once you point a bright light at it. A dark, matte offcut of carpet or matting around the hitting zone often cleans up false readings on its own.

Update firmware and check the software settings (fixes 7–9)

7. Update the firmware. This gets skipped constantly, and manufacturers push detection improvements through firmware all the time. Open the unit's app, check you're on the latest version, and let it finish without unplugging anything. Recalibrate afterwards before you judge whether it worked.

8. Check the sim software matches. A launch monitor on new firmware talking to an out-of-date copy of GSPro or E6 Connect is a classic mismatch that shows up as dropped shots. Update both ends. And after any update, dig into the detection settings — things like minimum club-speed threshold and shot-validation sensitivity often reset to defaults, so a session that worked yesterday suddenly filters half your shots out. Note your working settings down somewhere so you can put them back.

9. Give the PC some headroom. Real-time shot processing wants CPU and memory to itself. Antivirus scans, a Windows update grinding away in the background, cloud sync and a dozen browser tabs will all rob it. Close what you don't need before a session. Most of the dropped-shot grief I see on borderline machines disappears the moment the PC is actually up to the job — it's exactly why we spec our sim-spec laptop (£1,750.00) the way we do rather than leaving people to fight a general-purpose office machine.

Chase the connection dropouts (fixes 10–11)

10. Go wired if you can. A lot of "missed" shots aren't missed at all — the unit sees them fine, but the data never reaches the PC. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in a UK terrace surrounded by neighbours' networks, baby monitors and a microwave is a busy, noisy place. If your unit offers a USB connection, use it; it takes wireless interference off the table entirely. If you're stuck on wireless, put the unit on a dedicated 5GHz network and keep competing devices off that band.

11. Check power and cables. An underpowered or intermittently-connected unit drops shots that look identical to a detection fault. Charge a battery unit fully. For USB power, use the manufacturer's cable into a proper USB 3.0 port on the machine, not a passive extension on a front-panel port. A cheap thin cable, or a run over about 2m without an active extension, will corrupt data quietly.

Recalibrate, then reset — and know when it's actually broken (fix 12)

12. Recalibrate from scratch, then factory reset as a last resort. Calibration drifts if the unit's been knocked, moved or sat somewhere it vibrates. Set it on a genuinely level, stable surface — not a wobbly shelf that shakes on every strike — and run the full calibration routine. If it's still misbehaving after everything above, do a factory reset and set it up fresh; it clears out corrupted settings that nothing else touches.

One more UK-specific gremlin worth naming: condensation. A camera unit that's been in a cold garage overnight can fog its lenses and go blind until it warms up. I keep mine in the house and carry it out just before a session, and I'll run a small dehumidifier in the room over winter. Wipe lenses with a proper microfibre cloth — never household cleaner or an abrasive pad on the optics.

If you've genuinely worked through all 12 and it still won't track — the unit throws error codes on calibration, won't power up cleanly, or has visible lens or sensor damage — then it's a hardware fault and it's time to talk to the manufacturer under warranty. But that's the rare exception. My honest bet on any new "it's not tracking" message: it's the ball position or the mat first, the lighting or the connection second, and the settings third. Start there and you'll almost certainly have it hitting again tonight.

Frequently asked questions

Why does my simulator track some shots but miss others?

Intermittent tracking — reads driver, drops wedges, or reads one in three — is almost always ball position or a connection dropout rather than a broken unit. The ball is creeping out of the strike zone on some shots, or the data is being lost between the unit and the PC over a busy wireless connection. Mark your ball and unit positions with floor tape and switch to a wired USB link, and it usually settles down.

Do I need special golf balls for my launch monitor?

Radar units like the Mevo Gen2 and R10 read any clean ball happily. Some camera units read best with a clean white ball and, on certain models, a metallic dot or marked ball oriented exactly as the manufacturer says. Scuffed range balls and old yellowed practice balls are the ones that cause trouble on camera systems — keep a few decent balls aside just for the sim.

How often should I recalibrate?

Only when something changes. If the unit's been knocked, moved, or the room's had a big temperature swing — common in an unheated UK garage between summer and winter — recalibrate. Otherwise a stable, level setup holds its calibration for a long time, and needless recalibration just introduces new variables.

Can Wi-Fi interference really cause missed shots?

Yes, and more often than people think. If your unit talks to the PC wirelessly, lost data packets show up as shots the unit detected but the software never received. A wired USB connection is the reliable fix. If you must stay wireless, put the unit on a dedicated 5GHz network and keep other devices off that band.

Radar or camera — which is easier to keep tracking reliably at home?

Camera units like the GC3, R50 and Eye Mini are less fussy about room length but demand good, steady lighting and precise ball placement. Radar units like the Mevo Gen2 and R10 don't care about light but need ~2.4m of clear space behind the ball. Match the technology to your room first — a radar unit crammed into a short garage, or a camera unit under changing daylight, will fight you no matter how well you calibrate it.