Hello, I'm new here and would like to say Hello to everyone. I have only been playing golf about 2 years and have trouble judging distance. Which do you think would be better to use. GPS or Laser Rangerfinder. I know you have to pay an annual fee. That's no problem. Is the GPS that much better than the other. Any thoughts would be helpful.
Thanks alot. scrub

Welcome to the forum!

This is a great question, and is one that we've debated here extensively. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Ideally, it would be best to have both. Rangefinder for practicing and a GPS unit for play. However, that's not always feasible. Here are a couple of threads which should help answer your question:

http://www.golfwrx.com/forums/index.php?sh...rangefinder+gps
http://www.golfwrx.com/forums/index.php?sh...rangefinder+gps
http://www.golfwrx.com/forums/index.php?sh...rangefinder+gps

Hope that helps.

Welcome to the forum.

Something in this discussion that I had not thought of happened to me last week while I was on my practice range at our club. Our club co-hosted a father son tournament with the other private club in our city.

There were a lot of guests at our club over the course of the tourney.

One of the guys had a SkyCaddie but was on the practice range. He had no idea about the distances to our target flags on the range and had no way of telling what the distances were. I pulled out my Pinseeker 1500 and shot each flag and told him the distances. Not sure if practice range targets are loaded into any of the Sky Caddie units, but with my Bushnell I could get those yardages for him.

Skycaddie does have range distances included on many golf courses. In my opinion the skycaddie is the only way to go on a golf course.

..and I'll follow that one up with the fact that the Pinseeker is the ONLY way to go, in my opinion. It is ridiculous how many times I've seen a Sky Caddie be flat out wrong...by 20 yards or more.

Without a doubt, Pinseeker. I play with a guy who uses a sky caddie and all he knows is the center of the green, he has to ask me where the pin is and he is usually off by 10 yards. I can target anything I want on the golf course, not just bunkers and greens. Pinseeker is a one time payment, no need for downloading. The guy tried to make it justified why he bought his sky caddie but theres no doubt he wished he would have bought a pinseeker instead or else he would have stopped asking me for distances to check how far off his was. I don't even use the gps systems that some golfcourses come with.

this one has been beaten to death. They both have their plusses and minuses. I sold my sky caddie and got a bushnell, because of the terrible inaccuracies of the sky caddie. But, now I have to be able to see my target, where the sky caddie could tell me about a bling target.

And yea, I tried 3 different sky caddies, on several courses. I think the guy who mapped them around here enjoyed his beer on the job.

Go laser all the way. Assuming cart GPS's are representative of handhelds, I've found that cart GPS's might yield corresponding yardages (to the laser) on one hole, be 2-3 yards off on the next and 10-15 yards off on the next. Maybe course pros don't go to all the pains to be 99.9% accurate each day? Who knows? Maybe it's not the pro at all - Cart GPS's will sometimes vary by 10-yards with the carts sitting adjacent each other.

I have marked several courses with the sky caddie. I love it and it is almost always right on, SG4. I have both. Don't know why your friend only has one target on his he has it set up wrong. If you think it's off mark it yourself it isn't hard to do. The professional marked courses have up to 40 targets a hole and the green is laid out awesome.