He may not have entered the world, or the NBA for that matter, looking like an old man, but Steve Nash certainly has had a Benjamin Button-esque career arc. Like the basketball version of a fine glass of wine, or Betty White, he’s only gotten better and more popular with age. Just six days short [...]
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Come out and have a blast while playing in David Macklin's Flag Football Event on January 28-29 at Paseo Highlands Park, 3435 West Pinnacle Peak Road, Phoenix.
Sponsorship support is appreciated as Glory Days 4 on 4 is in partnership with 27 Reasons Foundation.
Proceeds given to Phoenix Children's Hospital and Tumbleweed program. Building meaningful connections while playing flag.
For more information, visit www.glorydays4on4.com.
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I’d like to thank Kim Cahalan of Media Direct and the folks at Brunton for supplying me one of these units to review. I’m not typically a “GPS Guy” and for the past couple of years have carried around the base model ETrex and used it mostly to mark simple waypoints.
You can read the low-down on the Get Back here: Brunton Get Back but features include:
Overall dimensions: 2.75?x1.5“x0.5?
Accuracy of 12 feet in normal GPS mode
3 waypoints to find your way back to 3 different locations
Arrival notification within 30 feet of destination
Rechargeable battery with up to 13 hours of continuous use
Signal Strength indicator
Brunton SyncTech™ enabled, recharge internal battery from Brunton power packs or solar panels
Self Calibrating Digital Compass
Blue Back light
Battery Life function
Metric/Standard
Recharges with included USB cable
Small and light weight, only 1.3 ounces
This thing is just slightly bigger than your car alarm key-fob. It stores 3 way-points. It works like a charm!
The Unit comes in sturdy packaging. The night before my hunting trip, I pulled it out and read the directions. In one word – simple. I’m no techie geek, but am not a neanderthal either. These directions were clear, and just enough. One small page, front and back. Best part, I let it charge all night via a convenient USB cable supplied with the unit.
The next day I was off to Arizona’s Unit 37B to roam the Sonoran desert for javelina and desert mule deer. For those of you who have never been to Arizona, you might be surprised. When many people think “desert”, they think “Sahara”. Sure, Arizona deserts can be hot and dry, but in the winter they are lush, green and full of life. It’s big, thick, rolling country and can be easy to lose your bearings when navigating.
I parked at my spot, got my gear and bow ready, and then pulled the Get Back.I turned it on and it locked into its satellites in under 2 minutes, better than my Garmin ETrex. Since it was the first time using the device, I calibrated the compass per the directions, a process which took another 3 or 4 minutes and was pretty simple. I stored my truck as the first way-point, and off I went.
You can use the unit in two modes – compass and navigation, which is pretty cool. It also has a battery life display. After a full night of charging, it indicated 13 hours of use available. The unit goes into a power-save or sleep mode, after 5 minutes or so.
In Navigation mode, you can save waypoints (up to 3) or find distance and direction to an existing waypoint. When I finally found a spot where javelina had been feeding, I marked waypoint Number Two.About a half mile away from that shredded prickly pear, I hit javelina paydirt – piles of scat like I had never seen before – plentiful and very fresh. Found some fresh beds too, under some Palo Verde trees.I figured it was only a matter of time before I was slinging arrows at pigs so I set down my pack, jacket and camera; I covered them up and marked waypoint Number Three. Then, the creeping mode was on, with only bow and binos.
I snuck around that square mile or so, for hours, to no avail! I don’t know if I had just missed them, or whether I was pushing them around all day but I never heard, smell or saw a single javelina. I looked at that Get Back a hundred times as I patterned the area, after each leg coming back to my pack safely stashed under a mesquite tree. It’s funny, a dozen times I looked at the unit and thought “no way” when it said to go in a direction I didn’t believe. Every time I ended up where I was supposed to.
Finally, I was a tired boy, and with a two mile, tough slog back to the truck I decided to head back. I’ve hunted this area a lot so obviously I knew where my truck was.It was fun though to constantly check the Brunton as I monitored the distance I was covering and noting the direction I thought I should be going, versus the real direction. After a day in the desert and constantly checking the GPS, it showed 10 hours of battery life remaining at the end of the day.
The site shows this device retails for around . Listen, if it gets you back when you need it, that is money well-spent. I love this thing. Magnetic compasses can break. More complicated GPS Units can be complicated, have issues and often are more expensive than many hunters can afford. Of course, anyone hunting, fishing hiking or camping should have a compass and know how to read a map. That being said, the Brunton Get Back is handy, affordable, accurate and very easy to use. Two big thumbs up from me, and I won’t be afield without it, in the future.
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For Suns fans that won’t be making it to US Airways Center for the game against the Cavs on Thursday, you can tune in to the game on FOX Sports Arizona Plus. It will be the first Suns game of the season on FOX Sports Arizona Plus, with the pregame show beginning at 6:30 p.m. [...]
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Known throughout Arizona for its first-class Thoroughbred racing, Turf Paradise is celebrating its 56th Anniversary on Saturday, January 14, and is inviting Suns fans to attend. Besides drink specials, free cake, a family fun park, live music and numerous horse races, the venue is giving away duffle bags to the first 3,000 fans to show [...]
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When the NBA started pushing their ‘Big Things Are Coming’ slogan it seemed like nothing more than a very creative marketing message from the new age Mad Men in New York. (Since Don Draper would be well into his 80’s by now I’m guessing he wasn’t involved in the creative on this one. That, and [...]
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When starting this weekly ‘Top 5’ blog I could have decided on a simple subject matter to kick things off. Something like ‘the top 5 players in Suns history’ or ‘the top 5 things Charles Barkley said that shocked people’. You know, things that are easy and obvious. Instead I decided to save those for [...]
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After four days of training camp, the Suns gave a sneak preview of their progress to the media and select season-ticket holders Wednesday in the cozy confines of the Grand Canyon University Arena. It was an intra-squad scrimmage, pitting one half of the team against the other half. The black team, captained by Steve Nash, [...]
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‘Tis the season. In most years that phrase refers solely to the hustle and bustle that comes along with the holidays. This year is a little different than most. In 2011 the saying also applies quite well to the craziness and excitement that will be the Phoenix Suns’ truncated preseason. Most of you will [...]
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It seemed like a forgone conclusion that Rich Rodriguez would get back into coaching, it was simply a matter of when and where. Those questions were answered last week when Rodriguez was hired as the next coach at Arizona, taking over for the fired Mike Stoops.
Now there will be plenty of other questions to answer. Rodriguez still has the blemish on his resume that was the stop at Michigan, though he explains in the following interview why he still believes he was on the right track there. And people are already wondering if he can replicate what he did at West Virginia while he’s coaching in Tucson.
Rich Rodriguez joined KTAR in Phoenix with Doug and Wolf to discuss why he decided Arizona was the right fit, how much convincing it took, the vision for the program going forward, the biggest challenge he’ll face, what he learned from his stint at Michigan, if he can replicate his success at West Virginia and why he signed on to coach without visiting Tucson.
Why did you decide you’d like to coach at Arizona?:
“The thing that appeals to me is obviously they’ve had some success there. Mike Stoops had them right on the cusp and did a pretty good job and they were right there and just had some tough luck. … They’ve had success in a lot of other sports. Look what they’re doing in men’s basketball, what they’ve done in softball. It’s a great college town with tremendous fan support, tremendous alumni support. … The other thing that appealed to me was that the staff played such a big role in hiring me. … We’re building a brand new facility. … The timing, I think, is just perfect.”
How much convincing did it take and at what point did you decide, ‘This is it’?:
“It was kind of a process. Obviously I was hungry to get back into coaching. I enjoyed the media part of it. I don’t know about putting makeup on. … It kind of gave me a chance to stay involved in the game and see other programs and all that, so I was really hungry to get back in coach. And, again, [athletic director] Greg Byrne did a tremendous job of explaining his vision for the program. … He called everybody and their brother about me and did his due diligence on me, too, which is fair, and toward the end of the process … then I started asking more questions.”
More on the vision:
“I had a great meeting with some of the other administrators … and I just felt it was comfortable. I always thought that if you’re in a place that has the resources to have success — which we do there — and you’ve got everybody pulling the rope in the same direction, you’ve got a shot. … [At West Virginia] everybody was pulling the same direction.”
What is the biggest challenge going forward?:
“I’ve got to put together, obviously, a good recruiting class. That’s important right now, but I’ve also got to have the chance to evaluate where we’re at personnel-wise. A lot of people say, and it always bothers me, ‘when you get your kids in.’ I told the team that. … I said, ‘The day I agreed to become the coach, you became my kids.’ Obviously we’re going to recruit guys every year, but they’re my kids as soon as I signed that contract. We’ve got to find what we have and adapt to the things we do. … I’ve got a five-year contract to get it done. I don’t think it’ll take that long, but I think there’s a lot of pieces in place right now.”
What did you learn at Michigan and what would you do differently?:
“I’ve thought about that a lot. Going in, people say, ‘Well, it didn’t work for you at Michigan.’ I still believe it was working, it was just taking longer than I wanted. We went from three to five to seven wins and we thought this year we’d win nine, 10 or 11 and they’re already at that level. Then, Year Five was going to be even better. I just felt we ran out of time. We had a few obstacles in the beginning because there were a whole bunch of misconceptions about ‘This guy’s an outsider and doesn’t understand our tradition.’ … We had to fight that a little bit. … That being said, I think we’ve learned from that. … I think I’m a better coach now than I was three or four years ago when we were the cat’s meow at West Virginia.”
Can you take Arizona where you took West Virginia?:’
“Everybody wants to talk about offense and I was very fortunate to have some dynamic players offensively and did some really neat things. But it’s really more about an attitude and a program and what I call a hard edge. When you play with a hard edge, you can see 11 guys out there playing as hard as they can on every snap. … I love fast players, but I love physical players even moreso. That kind of attitude and culture is something we want to implement immediately.”
Did I hear correctly that you took the job without visiting Tucson?:
“Yep, I sure did. I talked to about probably 10 or 15 people that have either lived there for an extended period of time or spent quite a bit of time there. To a person, every single one of them said it’s a great place to live. If somebody would’ve said, ‘I don’t know about this or that,’ maybe I would’ve said I needed to see it first, but heck, I signed sight unseen.”
Listen to Rich Rodriguez on KTAR in Phoenix here
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