People go to all kinds of lengths to improve their handicap: special training aids, gloves made to measure, and (occasionally) scheduling work around tee-off time instead of the other way around.

It’s therefore surprising that one little thing that may be holding you back is that most people are just really bad at judging distances by eye. If, for instance, you know that you can drive a ball 200 yards on a good day, it’s helpful to know that the far edge of that sand trap yonder needs 190 to clear.

This device removes the guesswork from this task. It will also tell you the distance to the near edge and center of each obstacle or green, giving you a good idea of which club to use.

As the built-in GPS is accurate only to within a few yards, this is clearly meant to improve your long game, not putting. Each battery charge should last for two to three rounds, and you can use a magnet on the back to attach it to a golf cart or clip it to your bag.

Also, unlike wind speed meters, devices like this are usually allowed in competitions. You may want to check the rules for each course, but as this gadget does not give you any slope or weather information, you should be good to go.

This Bushnell is a fairly basic model, without any features like exercise tracking and a very rudimentary display that takes some getting used to.

On the other hand, it’s also cheap, reliable and not that hard to operate. Its few shortcomings are easily rectified by downloading the Bushnell golf app, which gives you a bird’s-eye view of each hole, helps keep score and lets you add new courses to this device’s stock database of 36,000 all over the world.