 Welcome to Road Gear Reviews, I'm Tom from Morton's On The Move and today we're taking a look at a product that will read the height of overhead obstacles over your RV, the Giraffe G4. Stick around. So the Giraffe G4 is a system that, as in this picture, beams sonar up to an obstacle above your truck to tell you how tall it is from the ground and if your RV is going to be able to fit underneath it. You mount the sonar piece outside and run a wire into a display that you mount in the cab. We have ours mounted right up here on the dash. When you turn it on and pull underneath an obstacle it will read the height from the ground to the top of that obstacle. You can set an alarm in the system so that if it is lower than the top of your RV and an alarm will sound it will beep and warn you don't pull any further forward. The system is designed to work by pulling slowly underneath an obstacle and allowing the sonar piece to read the height to it. The system is not designed to work when running down the highway at highway speeds. You need to pull underneath the obstacle slowly so that you can make sure that you're going to clear it before you pull any further forward. This has been really helpful for us with gas station awnings or even like a low train trussell or something like that. Even like an overhead bar for a ranch, it will read the height to those as well. We've been testing it out for a few months now. We've found that it doesn't really work that well with tree branches. It just doesn't give you a really good reading. But any solid surface it seems to give a really good reading on. Installation of this I found to be really easy. It basically includes the readout display, a cable that runs up to and including the sonar piece that you mount on your truck, and a power cable that you can just run across your dash or wherever and down and plug into the standard 12 volt receptacle for your truck. They do include a little rubber grommet so that you can drill a hole if you want and put the wire through that to the outside. We just ran it along the rubber molding in our truck and just popped it out around the door and up on top. This system is really designed for semi trucks. It's designed to mount to a round bar mirror bracket, but a giraffe G4 sells a magnetic mount that you can screw that sonar base down to and stick it to the top of your truck. So after you get it installed, you need to set it up to measure the height properly. And that requires getting into the settings on the box, which is really easy by just pressing the settings button on here. Scrolling down, you first of all have the alarm setting. You can turn the alarm on or off, and that's what will actually beep when you're not going to clear something. The next setting is feet or metric. It'll read out in meters. And then after that you have the height to the top of your RV. You need to set the tallest point to your RV or trailer. And then you need to measure the top of the sensor that you installed on your truck to the ground as well. And it needs that. So what it does is it calculates the difference from the top of the truck or the sensor to the obstacle, adds that to the height of your truck, and that's how it gets the entire height of the obstacle. In our testing, we found it to be quite accurate. We pulled under a handful of awnings that we knew the height of and it was accurate pretty much dead on. It can even measure really small variations in the obstacle. We've gone over a couple awnings that have kind of an edge to it and it'll read that and then it'll drop up when it gets up to the taller portion a couple inches or so. So you need to make sure that you drive slowly over it so you can figure out that lowest point on the obstacle you're trying to clear. The system has to be turned on by pressing the power button over here. It stays on for about a minute and then shuts off. So you need to make sure to press that before you get to the obstacle you're coming to. It won't just stay on. If you do leave it on while driving at highway speeds, we notice that it bounces around all over the place and even sounds the alarm sometimes. And the manufacturer says that's due to wind shear because it uses Sonar, which is a sound-based measuring system. The high wind velocity will interfere with that and actually give it some false readings. Overall, we've really enjoyed having the Giraffe G4 installed in our truck. It gives us a lot of peace of mind when pulling under gas station awnings or something that we're just not quite sure if we're going to clear. And it's been working very well. The Sonar piece mounted on top of the truck appears to be really well built, waterproof. It has a nice bubble level indicator on it so you can find what level is because you need to make sure that it's level so that when it points up at the obstacle that it gets a nice solid reading. The display is nice and bright. You can see it in the daytime with sun directly on it. The buttons on here are extremely easy to press and it's really straightforward. It's only got a couple options, but simplicity is key with something like this. It just works. It does its job and it tells you how tall the obstacle is. Driving any tall rig going underneath obstacles can always be a nail biter situation if you're not 100% sure that you're going to clear it. And this just gives you that peace of mind that you're going to make it and I think that's really nice to have. It would be nice if it measured tree branches a little bit better, but it doesn't do that very well. We're frequently in low tree branch situations. If the tree branch is really large and directly over it, it will give us usually a warning because we're going to run it over. But otherwise, a lot of times tree branches are kind of off to the side. It needs to be mostly directly over the device to actually get a good measurement. The display has really nice bright numbers and I think that the menus inside it to adjust your alarm and your cab and trailer clearance heights are pretty straightforward and easy to use. I really like how large it is. It's so easy to see, but the large size of it can actually be sort of a drawback. I was hoping that I could mount it somewhere on my dash here, but it was a little too big to just stick it on anywhere. I don't have that much space, so that's why it ended up on the windshield where it is. It would also be nice if it had some sort of a mounting system. There is nothing on the back. It's just flat, so maybe you could use like a clamp and a suction cup type thing. In my case, we just used the Velcro type snap lock, but it seems to work pretty well. It's been there for a couple months and it's not obtrusive to our view or anything, so I'm happy to have it there. I think that this is a great product for anybody who's looking for that little extra piece of mine or is concerned about overhead clearance, and it's just neat to have as well. You would need a pilot car to measure a bridge for you like this or one of those tall poles, so you can basically be your own oversized load and make sure that you're not going to crash into any bridges. Well, this has been my review and thoughts on the Giraffe G4 system. Thanks for watching. Be sure to stick around for road gear reviews for weekly uploads to gear up for your adventures. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. Also, be sure to subscribe to our channel for weekly uploads of our travel product reviews.