Thanks to sauzatime for pointing out that back in May, in my original review for the SkyCaddie SG4 by Sky Golf, I had promised a follow-up review to share my longer term experience with the unit.

As I sit here now, reviewing my own experiences with the product, I don’t have a ton to add to my original thoughts.

I can recall one bad experience I had throughout the summer. It was a very hot and humid day where there was a lot of haze. Almost to the point where it was starting to feel overcast.

The unit had a little trouble communicating with enough satellites to get an accurate reading. Yardages were somewhat slow to display after I had been moving around. After I stopped and stood still, the yardages still changed for several seconds as the SG4 slowly refined its reading.

There were a couple of times that day that I felt that the final yardages were off, too.

With all that said, I didn’t experience that regularly. Also, I don’t recall having any problems on cloudy days. My gut feeling is that the problems that day maybe came from distortion in the atmosphere from the high amount of heat, humidity, and haze.

If it wasn’t that, I don’t know what it was. It certainly was the exception, not the rule.

Another thing I noticed was, as the season progressed, I was relying on the unit somewhat less. When I first got it, of course it was a new toy so I was getting yardage for every shot and was measuring the actual distance traveled for most shots.

As time wore on, I got to the point where I was playing more by feel. I tend to do that anyway, because at the course where I learned the game, yardage came in 50 yard increments (nothing printed on sprinkler heads) so I had to learn to play that way. If I’m standing between two yardage markers, I have good feel of the club to hit and how much power I need.

That has more to do with the style of my game than the usefulness of the device.

Another reason for that is that I play 95% of my rounds at the same course. I don’t need the SkyCaddie to tell me that I have a 9 iron left to the green after a good drive on the first hole.

I definitely got the most benefit out of the ability to measure the distance between any two points. For instance the position of the ball and then the position where it ends up after the shot, to measure the distance I hit that club. I was able to measure the distance between landmarks too. For example, I might go through a hole and note the distance from the tee to a specific point I want to lay up to, and note it down for next time. The courses the get uploaded into the unit have a lot of that info already, but not to every point on the course that I might care to know about.

To run it all down…

• I think the accuracy is pretty good. The device is easier to use than a laser, and faster.
• However, a laser helps out more as you get very close to the green, because you can get precise distance to the pin. The SG4 gives front, middle, and back, and also lets you move the cursor around on the screen to get yardages to specific points, but you have to kind of know exactly where the pin is sitting or you could be a few yards off.
• The ability to measure your own custom distances is very valuable to me.
• The SkyCaddie is reliable, with the exception of that one day I mentioned.
• I found myself using it less as time went on, only because the style of my game dictated that after the newness wore off. This was also due to the fact that I play 95% of my rounds at the same course. For players that travel around or rely on precise yardages, it would be much more valuable.

I still recommend the product. If money is the deciding factor, then you might want to save a little and go with a laser (you can save on low end ones, but high end lasers will cost the same or more than a SkyCaddie SG4).

The optimum scenario would be to have both, because each offers its own benefits. If that’s not possible, then I feel that the SkyCaddie SG4 is a solid product and worth looking at.

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