Ringing Forums

I’m not familiar with CAS but they’re is an alternative you might like to look at. We use CIREL which takes input from a Bagley sensor and saves touches in Lowndes format.
The analysis is simpler than what Hawkear (I assume using CAS) gives but we find it useful.
We have calibrated our sensor timings to match the clapper timings by ringing te bell own with Abel sound as well and adjusting the delay until we couldn’t tell which was first. All can’t (or couldn’t when we did it) adjust for oddstruckness but our bells aren’t.
Apply to share our experience.
See: cirel.org.uk.

Thank-you John. Cirel looks promising, complete with some explanation. I'll have a play with that.
I did initially set the sensor outputs close to the sound and if we establish a means of analysing our striking, will check and refine the setup further.
We have some very slight oddstruckness, I don't think sufficient to cause an issue at this stage. If it does become an issue (living in hope!) I could trial offsetting the sensor from BDC.

Almost every discussion on this topic starts with how to adjust Abel to match the odd-struckness of the bells. I would urge you not to do this, and instead to fix the bells to match Abel.

As you say slight odd-struckness is not your primary concern for your current band so I wouldn't worry about altering either for now.

In Abel you start by pressing the "Reset striking records" button (the icon is 3 underscores). Then ring your touch. After you stand press the "Striking" button (the icon is the 3 underscores with the numbers 12 3 above). Then press the "Save As" button, this will create a file in "My Documents\AbelSim\Striking".
You can also save the file by just pressing Ctrl+F while in the main Abel window.

Now run CAS and open this file to analyze it.

Its been a long time since I used CAS but my memory is that its more useful feature was the ability to visualise piece of ringing. This is effectively a "blue line" diagram showing the ringing as it was actually rung rather than having numbers in nice neat columns. We found this visualisation of the ringing, compared to what it should be, to be a very strong tool in making the band sit up and take notice. It also shows very well how inconsistencies in the ringing manifest themselves throughout the change. You can see how very slow leading for example either causes the bells behind to all shift later pushing the back of the change later, or produces a bunched up remainder of the change depending on how the bells later in the change decided to deal with the slow leading.

CAS can also deliver numerical statistics about whether people are consistently quick or slow at each stroke, and what their standard deviation is. We found this to be of relatively little use for a local band, people weren't interested enough by a pure numerical output and weren't prepared to invest the time into understanding the model and what it was telling them.

You don't need to tell CAS what you are ringing. Its model does not take account of where bells should be according to the method. The model simply accepts the order in which they rang as being the order and then works out how far they deviate from where the model interprets that they should be (which is pretty much how a striking competition would be judged). If two bells perfectly swap, there would be no detriment to the striking score.

The downside of this mechanism is that with poor ringing where the bells frequently don't ring in the right order the software struggles to cope with it. It is especially bad if the next change runs into the previous one. In general though if the ringing is like that then it isn't a striking tool that you need.