HuntFix

Sight it. Range it. Mark it. Find it.

You watched it drop on the far face. Now go and find it.

From your shooting position you can see exactly where the animal is. An hour later you are standing on that face, and every metre of it looks the same. HuntFix fixes the position while you can still see it, and navigates you back to that fixed point however long the walk takes.

See how it works What it does

iPhone. Works with the rangefinder you already own — any brand, you read the number and type it in. No account. No reception needed.

The HuntFix confirmation screen: a satellite map of an open tussock face with the shot position, the target pin and the line between them, above tiles reading 195 m distance, 0 m vertical and plus or minus 35 m accuracy.
SightPoint the phone at the animal and lock the bearing and elevation angle it is holding.
RangeType in the distance your laser rangefinder gave you. Metres or yards.
MarkThe phone works out an estimated position for the animal, and how uncertain it is.
RecoverWalk the valley, cross the creek, climb the far side. The target does not move.

The problem is not the shot. It is the walk.

A bearing tells you which way. A range tells you how far. On its own, neither one gets you to the animal.

A steep grey bluff face photographed from across a valley, with three tahr on it — two on the skyline and one bedded in the rocks below.
Photo — tahr on the face 16:9 · 1600 px wide photos/originals/tahr-on-the-face.jpg
There are three tahr in this photograph — two on the skyline, one in the rocks below them. Now find that same spot after you have dropped into the creek and climbed back up, with the skyline gone and every gut looking like the one beside it.
What you have now

A rangefinder

It gives you an excellent number, once, and then forgets it. The number is only useful while you are still standing in the place you took it from.

What you have now

A bearing lock

Garmin's Sight 'N Go and its equivalents walk you out along a line. A line is half the answer: it can put you on the right bearing and still leave you searching along it.

What HuntFix adds

The other half

Your phone already knows where you are standing, which way it is pointed and at what angle. Add the one number your rangefinder gives you and the two become a point instead of a line.

Who built it

I have hunted this country since I was a boy.

I am Scott. I am not a software company — I am a hunter who got tired of the search, and who writes software.

I live in the South Island, where red deer, fallow deer, Himalayan tahr, chamois, pigs and goats all run free on public land. Tops camps, bluffy faces, river flats and the long climb up the other side of a valley — that is the country HuntFix was designed around, because it is the country I hunt.

I built it for myself. Every decision in it is one I made as the person who would be standing on that face at four in the afternoon with the light going, and every one of them answers a problem I have actually had. It might be useful to you too.

Read the whole story →

The developer beside a small orange tent camped on a ridge top, rifle in hand, with the Southern Alps behind him.
Photo — who built it 3:2 landscape · 1400 px wide photos/originals/who-built-it.jpg

Position + bearing + angle + range = target

That is the whole app. Everything in it serves one workflow — Point → Lock → Range → Mark → Go — and nothing else is allowed to get in the way of it.

The HuntFix home screen showing GPS accuracy and a full-width MARK TARGET button.
One buttonGPS quality at the top, MARK TARGET under your thumb.
The range entry screen with a large keypad, 195 m entered, and toggles for line of sight or horizontal range.
Its own keypadBig keys, no system keyboard, metres or yards.
The navigation screen with an orange arrow, 176 m to target, and the note that direction is coming from your movement.
Numbers firstDistance and direction big enough to read at arm's length.
The navigation map, on satellite imagery, with the shot position, the breadcrumb trail walked so far, and the target inside its uncertainty ellipse.
Map secondUseful when it loads. Never needed for the app to work.
Three small tents pitched on a tussock flat beside a creek under moonlight, one lit from inside, with snow-covered peaks and stars above.
Photo — night camp full-bleed band · 2200 px wide photos/originals/night-camp.jpg
This is where it has to work. No reception, no help coming, and whatever the phone told you before dark is what you have got.

It tells you what it does not know

One rule sits above every other in this app: never imply precision that was not measured. It is why the app looks the way it does.

  • Every target carries an uncertainty. There is no path through the app that produces a target without one. The map draws it as a zone to search, not a pin to trust.
  • An unknown is a dash, never a zero. If the phone could not read an elevation, the screen says "—" and explains why. It will not quietly show you a number it made up.
  • A poor compass is said out loud. When the compass reports low confidence the bearing coarsens to the nearest five degrees rather than pretending to a degree, and the recovery zone gets honestly wider.
  • A shaky hold makes a wider zone. The app measures how much the bearing wandered in the second before you locked it, and folds that into the uncertainty.
  • The sighting is never edited. What was measured stays exactly as measured. If you move the pin by hand, the app stores that beside the calculation, never over it.

Where this is up to

HuntFix is not on the App Store yet. I have used it on my own hunts in the South Island and it has found animals for me — which is why it is becoming a product rather than staying on my phone.

What you will not find here is an accuracy figure. Every target the app makes tells you how uncertain it is, and that number is honest. But turning it worked for me into a published claim means measuring it against known positions, not counting the hunts that went well, and that work is still to do. Until it is, I would rather show you the method than a number.

Nothing about where you hunt leaves your phone

Hunting spots are sensitive. HuntFix has no account, no sign-up and no server, and the app contains no networking code of its own.

  • No account, ever. Open it and use it.
  • Your targets are files on your phone. Not synced, not uploaded, not readable by anything else.
  • Photos go to the app's own storage, never to your Photos library — so a hunting position does not turn up in your camera roll or in iCloud Photos.
  • The usage counters are integers. Eight of them, visible in Settings, and they never leave the phone. The counting code cannot carry a coordinate.
  • Maps are Apple's. Drawing a map means asking Apple for tiles — that much is honest to say. Everything HuntFix itself draws works with no tiles at all.

Read the full privacy policy →

What it costs

Two free recoveries, then you buy it once. Hunters buy gear; they do not rent it.

NZ$29.99 once

One payment. No subscription.

Two full free recoveries first

  • Unlimited targets — mark and recover as many as you like
  • Full recovery history, kept on your phone
  • Photo of the sight picture with every target
  • Breadcrumb trails and the accuracy breakdown
  • GPX export, Apple Maps and copy coordinates
  • Proximity haptics at 100, 50 and 20 m
  • Improvements to the marking and recovery tool as it grows

What that buys is Fix and Find — sighting a target, marking it, and recovering it — for good, on your Apple Account, along with the improvements that come to it.

More features may be added over time, and some of them will have running costs behind them: premium topographic maps, terrain elevation data, cloud backup, sharing targets with your hunting party. I reserve the right to offer those on a subscription. Whatever you have already bought stays yours, and is never taken away.

Questions

I shot it and it ran. Can HuntFix find a wounded animal?

No, and it will not pretend to. HuntFix does not track blood, it does not follow an animal that moved, and it cannot find something you never saw. What it can do is one step earlier: mark where the animal was standing when you shot, and mark the last place you saw it. Two fixed points on a map, marked while you can still see both, are a far better starting line for a search than a memory of a shape against a skyline — especially in open tussock and scrub, where there is often no blood trail to follow and no dog to follow it.

Is this the iPhone version of Garmin's Sight 'N Go?

It is Sight 'N Go with the missing number added. Sight 'N Go locks a bearing and walks you out along it, which puts you on the right line and leaves you searching along it. HuntFix takes the bearing, the elevation angle and the range from your rangefinder and does a full waypoint projection — the direct geodetic problem, solved on the WGS84 ellipsoid — so you get a point instead of a line, with an elevation and an uncertainty attached to it.

Do I need a particular rangefinder?

No. HuntFix is deliberately brand-agnostic: you read the number off whatever optics you own — Swarovski, Leica, Zeiss, Vortex, SIG, Bushnell, Garmin, anything — and type it in. There is nothing to pair and nothing to buy.

Does it need mobile reception?

No. Sighting, calculating, marking and navigating all run on the phone with no network at all. Only the map tiles come from Apple, and the app is built so a blank map changes nothing: the shot position, the target, the line and the uncertainty zone are drawn by HuntFix itself.

My rangefinder already corrects for angle. Will HuntFix correct it twice?

Not if you tell it. The range screen has a Line of sight / Horizontal switch, and a plain-language note about exactly this. Choose Horizontal when your rangefinder has already done the angle maths, and HuntFix will not do it again.

How accurate is it?

It has worked for me on my own hunts, which is why it exists as a product — but that is experience, not a measurement, and this site will not turn it into a number until one has been measured against known positions. What the app does do is tell you, target by target, how uncertain that target is, from the GPS accuracy, the compass confidence and how steadily you were holding the phone. When the measuring is done, the results will appear here.

Will a paywall stop me mid-recovery?

No, and that is a rule rather than a preference. The only check in the whole app happens on the home screen before you start a new sighting. An animal already on the ground is never held to ransom: navigating to a target that already exists works forever, bought or not.

What happens to my targets if I do not buy it?

Nothing. Saved targets, photos, trails, the accuracy breakdown and the exports all stay available. The unlock buys the next recovery, never access to the last one.

Does it work on flat ground?

Yes. The angle is simply zero and the maths reduces to the flat case. It was built for a valley because that is the hard version of the problem.

Is there an Android version?

Nope — I am an iPhone guy. If you want the app, buy an iPhone. An Apple Watch face may follow.