The Bushnell BackTrack Point 5 GPS

 

A person can be an avid hunter and experienced pilot and still not be a natural navigator. For me, maybe it’s because I grew up in New Jersey. I still look for street signs in the wilderness and I can lose a car to a mall parking lots for days. Really, and it’s all very stressful. Fortunately, peace of mind can be found in a very compact and inexpensive electronic device, Bushnell’s BackTrack Point 5 GPS.

 

What makes the BackTrack a standout product is that Bushnell has managed to put a lot of power behind a very user friendly interface. Anyone who has used a menu system on a cell phone, digital camera or coffee maker, would very quickly feel at ease using the BackTrack Point 5 GPS.

 

 

There are currently three BackTrack models, differentiated by the type and amount of information delivered and GPS receiver technology. None represent a GPS overkill, none qualify as taking a bazooka to a duck hunt, all provide varying degrees of essential location information.

 

 

There are four personal BackTrack applications that immediately come to mind. The first, locating the car in some of the sprawling and busy mall outdoor parking lots. The second, finding the correct boat return dock on some of the larger lakes. The third, locating the car or camp when returning from fishing and hunting locations. The fourth, property boundary walking in heavily wooded areas, a task that must accomplished a couple of times each year. Actually, I can think of a fifth, getting latitude and longitude coordinate when traveling and setting up a telescope’s “Go To” software.

 

 

 

 

Set up screen: The first time the unit is powered up it can be set to the user’s preferences: time zone, twelve or twenty four hour clock, temperature expressed in Fahrenheit or seltzer, yards or even meters for our rest of world friends and Americans born after… this past week. Again, the classic up/down arrow pick and poke selections.

 

Mark: The Mark button is pressed to set a point of origin. It doesn’t matter which way you are facing when setting as the BackTrack will measure distance and direction to wherever the user heads out.

 

Distance & Direction: The arrow points the way home and the return distance to the point of origin is indicated. The bottom left icon indicates which of five possible points of origins you have chosen to be displayed. There are five icons because there are five locations that may be stored. A user can create waypoints by utilizing a different point of origin icon for each waypoint saved.

 

Temperature and Altitude: The user can easily tell if it is the heat or humidity or, in my case, why my lungs stop working in Utah when I drive cross country.

 

Compass and Latitude & Longitude: This screen display a digital rendition of a compass, the user’s heading and latitude and longitude.

 

All screens display time, top left, remaining battery life, top right and if there is a satellite connection as signified by a non-blinking satellite dish icon, top far right. When not being read, the unit can be hung on a belt loop or placed in a pocket with the display turned off and it will continue to track direction and distance. Over longer distances, the display automatically changes to expressing distance in miles (or kilometers) rather than in yards or meters.

 

 

Very good. I intentionally tried to get lost, but could not. Then I gave my wife the assignment of helping me to get lost, an assignment she seemed to warm up to very quickly, but still no dice. I braved the tick laden woods of Maine, scrambled up and down hills and dirt roads and even strode the full length of the driveway on a mail check. The parking lots at Lowes and Home Depot offered no challenge. Nor did a drive down the creepy dirt road that branches off at the top of the hill and leads to a little house on the right… where everyone wears leather masks and carry chainsaws in their pickup trucks. Stephen King is a Maine amateur.

 

The BackTrack Point 5 is very small; .88″x2.3″x3.5″ and it weighs only two ounces, however, the display is even larger than the larger original BackTrack.

 

If there is anything I could suggest to further improve the product, it would be that Bushnell add a level indicating feature. The BackTrack, like any other compass oriented equipment, must be held level when being read. Not a very difficult task, but a level indicator would help when climbing up and down steep grades where visual cues may be misleading. Minor point.

 

The BackTrack Point 5 has a tag line that reads “Find your way back from anywhere”. I think that pretty much sums up the product’s purpose, but I would add a “+” for the other useful information it provides. Good product.