If there's one piece of golf technology that gets me excited, it's rangefinders. While their core functionality is well established (telling you how far you are from the flag), there's room to improve them. For example, we recently covered Bushnell and Foresight's new rangefinder tech that feels like cheating.
But one rangefinder stole my heart at last week's PGA Show: CaddyTalk's Windy, which happened to be the best rangefinder in our Best of PGA Show awards.
CaddyTalk Windy's two key features blew me away. It can triangulate the distance to the flag even if you're not standing next to the ball, and it can read the actual wind through a sensor. If you're a golfer, I don't need to tell you how game-changing these features are.
Why do I love the Windy and Cube rangefinders?
Even without the wind feature, I'd love this rangefinder. The triangulation feature, available on the already-for-sale Cube model, lets you get a reading to the flag from your ball without standing over the ball.
Why is this so awesome? Let's say you drive the ball way right, and the cart path is on the left side of the hole. If the course has made it cart-path-only (CPO) due to conditions, you need to guess which club to use based on the distance to the pin from your cart.
With triangulation, you can shoot the ball, shoot the flag and get the distance between them. This way, you'll know exactly which club to bring to the ball when you hit your shot on those CPO days. You won't have to walk back to the cart if you get your seven iron when what you really need is an eight.
While you can get that feature on the Cube right now, the Windy rangefinder kicks things up a notch by offering a pop-out wind sensor on the rangefinder. This lets you get plays-like distances that factor in the actual wind, not the wind reported on weather apps. Wind changes direction constantly, so getting this information in real-time can help you make better club decisions.
Sadly, the Windy rangefinder isn't coming out until later in 2025. Still, if the triangulation feature is the main selling point for you, Cube is out now for $349, a competitive price for a high-end rangefinder.
I saw the Windy on the exhibit floor of the PGA Show, so I couldn't actually test the wind feature on CaddyTalk's prototype. However, if it works as well as the triangulation, we should be cook. I did manage to test triangulation on the CaddyTalk rangefinder using several different points on the show floor (including the signs separating the rows, which are known to be 10 yards apart). The results of these tests proved dead-on accurate.
If I sound like I'm gushing a little too much, I can't help it. I saw hundreds of things at the PGA Show this year, and few impressed me quite as much as this rangefinder line from CaddyTalk.
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