This rangefinder is an extremely reliable companion for all golfing needs

Welcome to Tried It, GOLF.com’s series about golf gear – apparel, gear, equipment, etc. – which we just took out to throw away. We are here to offer our reliable, non-golf or near-golf items. So, scroll down to read about our favorite new (or new to us) golf products.

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There are only a few times in golf when a man can look his friends straight and lie with confidence:

“I called it.”

“He got the spirit.”

“That’s usually my club.”

But the biggest lie in golf history is this: “I thought it was 145.”

No, you didn’t. You thought it was between 138 and 163 because you guessed after four beers, a hot dog, three mulligans and a small, emotional fall on the last hole.

I’ve had four shortcuts over the years and each one ended up pissing me off. Others took forever to lock the pin. Others felt like a Happy Meal toy wrapped in rubber. A person can vibrate randomly as if getting an odd job instead of a yard. What I’m looking for is simple: speed, accuracy, clarity and something tough enough to survive being thrown at a golf cart driven by a retired firefighter with two Bloody Marys before 10am.

That’s where the Bushnell Golf Tour V7 Shift comes into your life as a little electronic caddy with reliability issues.

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I stopped at 3 humid places in the Catskills just after sunrise. The fog is clearing from the fairway, my back is already aching for no reason, and my friend Nigel, who swings the driver like he learned golf from a frontier survival manual, looks at the pin and says, “One in fifty is easy.”

Bushnell says 137. Slope fixed? 131.

Nigel holds the 7-iron anyway because confidence is more important to him than science.

What separates the Tour V7 Shift from the rest of the cheap Amazon rangefinder is that it looks like a taser from the future. You raise it to your eye and BAM, the OLED display is bright and shiny even in low light. The thing locks onto the pins with Bushnell’s Visual Jolt technology, vibrating in your hand the second it grabs the flag instead of the trees behind it. That alone saved me five strokes in two rounds because I spent less time hunting for flags and more time pretending I could record.

And the slope factor? It’s delicious. Golfers like to pretend they understand elevation changes. They don’t. We don’t understand the rules of golf. The Tour V7 Shift calculates the adjusted yardage instantly and gives you the real number your ego doesn’t want to hear.

The magnetic cart mount is another nice touch. It sounds small until you spend a season watching your rangefinder bounce around with mugs like changing a dryer. This item fits into the stroller frame and stays secure, even on rough stroller paths.

What surprised me the most was how premium it felt. It’s crowded. Waterproof. Rubberized. Like something the Navy SEALs would use to calculate sniper range from a margarita machine.

It’s not perfect. If your hands shake with too much caffeine or not enough talent, locking pins at long distances can still take a second. At nearly four hundred bucks, the Bushnell is not cheap. But there’s also no losing the three Pro V1s in the pool because you’re hoping for a “feel”.

App integration is actually one of the trickiest parts of the Tour V7 Shift. Pair it with the Bushnell Golf App and suddenly the thing starts working less like a rangefinder and more like a little gambling addict who knows your carry distances better than you do. It gives you GPS hole maps, hazard distances, shot tracking and, when you connect monitoring data with Bushnell’s LINK-Enabled system, personalized club recommendations right in the viewfinder. Impressive and slightly insulting. Nothing calms an old man down faster than someone who has found a range and quietly suggests, “Maybe it’s not a 5 hero today, hero.”

After nine, the Tour V7 Shift becomes a small gadget and a brutally loyal companion. The kind that every golfer needs.