Klem Wrote:DNS,
Most enjoyable.
Your judging distance method with the reticle is interesting (hog 11). What range did that turn out to be do you think?
The first assessment I said in the field at the time was 175 yards. Ben could vouch for that. In carefully watching the video afterwards, I would have guessed closer to one 150 because we never see all of the hog. In reality, I would say it was probably 160. We went 70 paces from that first point to where we set up to shoot. The hog, when we shot, was GPS'd at 101.8 yards. There is some variance in that and I generally round to the closest 5 yard increment and said 100 yards in the video. At the time, all I knew is that it was in the ballpark for that distance and could have been plus or minus 20 yards. I was not worried about specific yardage, just whether it was good enough for a reasonable shot. I know that sounds all loosey-goosey and it is, but it is the nature of the stadiametric ranging beast.
That isn't to say that stadiametric ranging can't be exact. It can be. However, it requires knowing the size of the target object. If your target object is smaller or larger than the size you believe it to be, that will throw off the range estimation.
Some scopes have stadiametric rangefinders in them, such as Pulsar, Bering Optics, and my Trijicon. I have never found them to be particularly useful, however, in large part because of having to push buttons to find the correct selection to do the process and that takes time. The Pulsars and Bering Optics thermal scopes have some animal silhouettes in them I don't know what animals they used to set these as their comparative norms, LOL, because they don't necessarily match North American animals. For example, I am fairly certain the hare used in their comparisons is the European hair which is much larger than say out cottontail rabbits and many of our jackrabbits. I am certain that their European deer (not such which one) corresponds to our small Texas Whitetail deer at all and our smaller Texas Whitetail don't even correspond to the same species up in the northern US that may be twice the weight and overall bigger and taller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCNDSrEua9s
I just needed something I could do on the fly and I didn't really need the exact yardage, but to know when the hogs were beyond my far point blank range. As it turned out, one horizontal radius worked well enough with normal full size hogs. If the hogs were too small, it would say the hogs were farther away and cause me to get closer, which as an error, was more beneficial than not, usually putting the hogs between point blank ranges, which works fine for me. If I get a non-typical hog, say a 450 pounder (which I don't know he is that big until he is on the ground) and I range him and think he is at 200 yards (so OK to shoot without correction)...and for some reason I can't get any closer, it will screw things up because he is going to be much farther away and my shot would be too low. Fortunately, giant hogs are really rare.