SkyCaddie Rangefinder a Great, Easy-to-Use Product

May 1, 2007 - I am not a technophile, not a person who looks forward to the latest electronic gadgets and gizmos. Although I spend all day working on a computer, my relationship with that piece of machinery is just as often adversarial as friendly.

So it was with some trepidation that I opened the box and took out the SkyCaddie SG4 GPS rangefinder by SkyGolf. Is there any of the dread "configuration" to do? How much time will be required for setup? Will it be a chore to figure out how to operate the thing?

My trepidation was misplaced. It turned out to be a breeze to get this SkyCaddie golf GPS unit up and running, and easy to operate. Best of all it was fun to use on the golf course.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably familiar with the basics of the SkyCaddie. This is the first rangefinder used on professional golf tours - the Tight Lies Tour, New England Pro Golf Tour and PGA EuroPro Tour all OK'd its usage during tournament play in or before 2007. As of the beginning of 2006, the USGA, under revised rules for rangefinders, began allowing their use in tournament play under a local rule.

And on many golf telecasts, you'll hear the on-course announcers referring to their SkyCaddies to provide yardages for the next shot.

SkyGolf uses Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology to map golf courses. That data is then made available on the SkyGolf Web site, where SkyCaddie owners can download it into their individual rangefinders.

Once you have in your SkyCaddie information about the course you are heading out to play, you'll be able use the SkyCaddie for, among other things:

• Getting yardages for each of your shots to your next target area on the hole
• Finding yardages to the front, middle and back of the green, from any line of approach
• Learning the distances to hazards on the holes, and carry yardages to clear those hazards
• Marking off the distances of your own shots so you'll know exactly how far you're hitting it

There's much more the SkyCaddie can do, and you can spend much time exploring yours and learning how to use it to help your golf game.

Aside from the obvious benefits of knowing exact yardages to target areas, and necessary carry distances to clear hazards, the SkyCaddie can have the added benefit of speeding up play - if used correctly.

A study of rounds of golf played on professional tours where the SkyCaddie was put into play found that it speeded up play by an average of 25 minutes per round in those tournaments.

That's because the SkyCaddie can immediately provide you with the correct yardage - no need to find yardage markers in the fairway, to step off yardages, or to spend a long time studying a yardage book. The information is beamed from the GPS satellite to the SkyGolf Web site, and then into your SkyCaddie for immediate display.

Getting our SkyCaddie SG4 unit (there are four models as of this writing, SG1, SG2, SG3, SG4, each with successively more features) was much easier than we expected.

After waiting a few hours to charge the battery, we followed the Quick Start Guide's instructions and in a matter of minutes were ready to go. The Quick Start Guide and instructional booklet really do a great job of explaining clearly and concisely what to do.

Part of the process is installing the SkyCaddie Desktop, a bit of software that resides on your desktop and facilitates communication between your SkyCaddie and the SkyGolf Web site when you are downloading course information. During the download process, we received a scary-looking warning from Microsoft not to continue with the download.

The instructional booklet advised to ignore this warning, but just be sure we called the SkyGolf helpline. A friendly representative explained there was nothing to worry about and to continue. Most SkyCaddie users get this error message upon installation, she said, and there is never any problem when continuing.

So we continued, and there was no problem.

The SkyCaddie is so easy to use that we managed to use it - and even use it properly - on our first trip to the golf course with it. And it was an overcast day of misting rain, but there were no outages, no loss of signal. The SkyCaddie worked great throughout.

One thing we noticed is that most SkyCaddie owners will find it irresistable to click around (using the eight buttons below the SkyCaddie's LCD screen, including one arrow button for navigation) during play, exploring all the gadget's features.

This is one way that the SkyCaddie can actually slow down play among recreational golfers, or at least among those whose SkyCaddies are new. Make sure that you're not paying more attention to your SkyCaddie than you are to pace of play. Once you get used to using the SkyCaddie, this shouldn't be a problem. Just be careful during your first few times using the SkyCaddie on the course.

All in all, we have to say the SkyCaddie SG4 is one terrific piece of equipment.

Drawbacks? It is expensive. The SG4 model we use is, as the time of the writing, retailing for around $350. But as stated up above, there are other models that provide fewer bells-and-whistles and cost less.