My racquet was supposedly strung at 40 pounds. The String Meter came out at 40 pounds for the long strings, but only 30 pounds for the cross strings. I took a few measurements from various tennis friends racquets. More often than not, the measurements were rather unsettling and seemed to have little correlation with the supposed racquet string tension they had ordered from the stringers.

I think this gadget works really well in terms of measuring the string tension of your racquet over time. You can tell how much tension your strings are loosing over time. But, in terms of checking the accuracy of your friends racquets I am not too sure how well it works.

What I get from this is that racquet stringing is a very imprecise art. Let's say you order string tension of 50 pounds with the exact same racquet and same strings from several different stringers. I have no doubt there will be marked differences between all of them. I suspect this difference could be associated with a very wide range. Between the lowest and highest you well could have a difference of 20 pounds (you order 50 and you get a low and high of 40 vs 60). The second issue is how do you measure this accurately. That's a tough one. I am not sure how precise the Stringmeter is.

Another weird finding is that I observed that the cross strings often come out at far lower tension than the long string. This is counterintuitive. From a physics standpoint you would think the opposite be true. A shorter string is much less flexible, and returns greater resistance to any torquing than a longer string. However, in essence the cross strings and the long strings make for two completely separate string jobs. Is there something in the standard stringer technique that make it so (that cross strings are associated with lower tension)?

As soon as I got it I checked all my family's string including my kids junior rackets. The meter was close to what I expected and showed a large range on each racket that was consistent with ho they were strung. Then I went to the courts and started checking all my friends rackets (They were begging me to...). All of the rackets were pretty close to what they were supposed to be including the people that were having their rackets strung loose (About 40lbs), I did find one racket that was supposed to be strung at 50lbs but was tight at about 62. The guy was not shocked as he said the strings felt very tight and he did not trust the guy that strung his racket. I cannot say that I would trust the meter to give me perfect readings but if you take several readings on different strings you can get a good average and I am convinced it will be close. More importantly I can tell when it is time to restring and stop blaming some of my bad hits on old strings!!

Very simple device but seems to be accurate. I used it to verify the tension of two recently strung rackets by two separate persons. One felt under tension whereas the other one felt right. However, I couldn't really without a proper measurement. I found out that one racket was indeed strung in the low-to-mid 60s, as I had requested, whereas the other was barely at 50. Now I know who to use for stringing my rackets!

Note that the instruction on how to properly use the device is crystal clear, but there are YouTube videos that show how to use it.

Like a lot of other people, I had to make a more accurately mark for the arrow. Once I did that it works great

Overall good instrument to have while stringing. There's a section calibrated to test an unstrung racquet in which you can test the mains only before doing the crosses. If they vary you can push down on the tighter strings so the looser ones will compensate to make for even string tension across the mains. This before starting the crosses. At least I found this beneficial to the overall completed string job.