Breadcrumb nocks, continued.....
As night hunting of wild hogs gets more popular and common, lighted nocks seem to be becoming an important piece of equipment for animal recovery. In addition, it is not uncommon for deer hunters to shoot a buck in the last few minutes of shooting light, and lighted nocks are becoming popular with deer hunters because they make it easier to see where the arrow hits and easier to find the arrow.
Breadcrumb is a newcomer on the lighted nock scene, and their nocks have some features that make them very attractive.
Everything about these nocks looks to be very high quality, from the packaging to the nocks. Here is what is in the box:
3 light=up nocks with batteries and shrink tube pieces to keep the batteries in place
3 practice nocks that match the weight of the light-up nocks
1 extra battery
some logo stickers and instructions...
The directions sent me to some Breadcrumb videos on-line to learn about the nocks. The first thing I wanted to know was how to properly install the battery. It was pretty simple, but it did require a little force, and I didn't expect that. After installing the battery, a small piece of blue shrink tube is installed and it keeps the battery from moving during shooting and at impact. The nocks fit perfectly into my Gold Tip carbon shafts and I started testing to see how they would perform.
Here is what these high-tech nocks are supposed to do:
1. Light up when the arrow gets shot
2. Stay lit for 30 seconds after target impact, at the 30 second mark they start blinking
3. They also have a Bluetooth locator built in that sends a ping signal to an app that you can install on your cell phone. This helps locate the arrow.
4. There is also a built-in sound device that makes the nock beep when you send a beep command from your cell phone. Another arrow-finding feature.
All of this sounds pretty great. The object of lighted nocks in bowhunting is to make an arrow easier to find, whether it is still in an animal, or it has passed through, or become dislodged. Even a clean miss that results in a found arrow saves the expense of a lost arrow. I studied optics years ago and the idea of a blinking light drawing the attention of the human eye is a solid concept, so the blinking feature is a good idea. And, the LED lights in these nocks are bright and give off a very obvious blue light that is very easy to see whether the nock is blinking or not.
The additional location features are what make the Bluetooth nocks something new and different. The Breadcrumb nock sends out a Bluetooth signal to a cellphone app. The app has two proximity levels that show up on the cell phone screen -- "close" and "very close" -- to aid in finding an arrow. It is a great idea.
In my tests I was able to get a "close" signal as far away as 45 yards from the blinking nock, and a "very close" signal up to 15 yards away. The bluetooth signals that make this work were most effective when I moved very slowly. If I walked quickly the signals did not work as well. In hunting use, I would expect to walk around slowly while looking for an arrow. I think this feature might be very useful.
The arrow-finding "beep" feature is a very interesting idea. The concept is that once you get "very close" you can use the app to get the nock to send out an audible beep that will make it much easier to locate the exact position of the arrow. It's a great idea, but on the nocks I received it was not workable. With the nock assembly outside of an arrow the beep was very faint. I could not hear it past two feet away. With the nock installed inside the arrow shaft, I could not hear the beep at all.
The nocks have a soft, rubber-like pushbutton on them that is pressed to arm, re-arm, and turn off the nocks. Press the button and the nock blinks once to tell you it is on. After you shoot, press the button once and the nock rearms to be ready to shoot again. Press and hold, and the nock blinks three times and turns off. It works like a charm.
The folks at Breadcrumb told me that the nocks were developed for compound and crossbow speeds, and that they were not sure if the accelerometer built into the nock would work with the slower speeds of traditional archery hunting bows. I tested the nocks with a variety of traditional bows at draw weights down to 30 pounds at 28" and two of the three nocks performed perfectly every time. The 30 pound bow I used for the low-weight test was shooting a 500 grain shaft, so the speed was much slower than any I would expect from a traditional bow used for hunting.
Unfortunately, one of the three nocks in the package was defective. It blinked 5 times when I first turned it on. It worked one the first shot, but when re-armed and shot again it failed and never worked again. The Breadcrumb folks told me that they had some manufacturing issues that they are getting fixed, and that the issues with this defective nock are issues they are working to solve.
The Breadcrumb nocks are heavy. On my scale they weighed 49 grains with the battery and shrink tube installed. The practice nocks are identical in weight to the assembled light-up nocks. This nock weight was enough to throw off the tune of my arrows, so I would have to work up a new arrow formula if I use Breadcrumb nocks as my hunting nocks.
The Breadcrumb nocks are viable for bowhunting with traditional bows -- the built-in accelerometer is sensitive enough to work at trad-bow speeds. They are very high quality light-up nocks with innovative features. And if the beeping feature gets worked out to be loud enough to hear, they could make arrows very easy to locate.
They are expensive at $119.99 for the box of three light-up nocks and three practice nocks.
Topic: Breadcrumb arrow nocks (Read 2210 times)
