It doesn't necessarily involve time travel. It could just require extremely precise backwards extrapolation.

And if it does involve time travel, it only requires the travel of pure information from the past to its future. And since information can already be transmitted to its future light cone, the idea that it's possible to specify a particular location in spacetime sufficiently specifically that you can induce a process to transfer information about that specified location to a specific point in its future lightcone (i.e. your apparatus).

Which still sounds extremely difficult, but also much more likely to be possible than describing it as time travel.

For the record, I assign the possibility of time travel that could travel to our current point in time as epsilon, the possibility of time travel that can travel to no point earlier than the creation of the specific time machine as very small (<0.1%) but greater than epsilon, and the possibility of the outlined information-only "time travel" as in the range of 0.1%-1%.