Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics SWFA SS 6X42 Mil Quad Reticle

Canazes9 sent the scope to me to give it the once over. I took it to my friend's shop, secured it into the jig and tested the scope's reticle accuracy, dialing accuracy, tracking, and parallax adjustment.








Reticle

The Mil Quad Reticle is marked in 1/2 and full mil increments. It is also broken down into smaller increments in certain parts of the reticle.




The reticle subtensions were very accurate.

Keep in mind that this is a straight 6X scope. The reticle subtensions appear pretty small in the first place and I didn't see the point of breaking the reticle down into .1 or .2 mils; shooters are not gonna do too much ranging with this scope. Actually being able to duplicate a .1 or .2 hold for wind or drop would be difficult because of the size of the reticle. Nevertheless, it's there.


Dialing and Click Value


I zeroed the scope on the board and carefully dialed from mil mark to mil mark. At 5 mils, the scope needed 5.1 dialed. Not too bad at all. Normally (and this scope fit the norm) the difference between reticle movement and what had to be dialed get worse as more dialing occures. Error increased at about 12 mils needing 12.2 to get there, and at 15, 15.3 was needed.

This is pretty damn good for a scope of this cost as you'll see later. Also, this scope really isn't going to be used for any Long Range shooting where precision is needed simply because of the magnification. About 5 mils of reliable travel will get a guy to 800 yards with a 6.5 Creedmoor.

All in all, the click values were pretty damn good.



Tracking


When I speak of how a scope "tracks", I'm talking about how the knobs are moving the reticle vertically inside the scope. It's very common for some scopes to be perfectly lined up on the vertical line on the board and when the elevation knob is cranked, the reticle will shift slightly to the left of the vertical line and move. When the knob is cranked the other direction toward zero, the reticle will shift back to it's original position on the line slightly to the right and move up.

This is called "running the race track". Imagine an elliptical movement from top to bottom then back up.

This scope "ran the track" as do some more well known brand names, but would always come back to the line if it was dialed past the destination and back to the destination. Example: I want to put 5 mils into the scope so I dial past 5 a tad and dial back to 5. Always approach the number from the same direction whether you're dialing up or down.

All in all, the scope's tracking was good.



Parallax Adjustment

The scope has a parallax adjustment just in front of the eyepiece. Talking to my friend who has tested many of the SWFA scopes, this was his major complaint about the scope. He related that the parallax was so sensitive, that to shoot at one range then move slightly out or in to another would require an adjustment in parallax. He basically stated that the scopes were simply "unusable" because of this. An example he gave was shooting at 100 yards then moving to 300. He said that there was so much parallax that the target would move "feet" in relation to the reticle when you moved your eye in the box. Imagine what this will do to accuracy.

With this particular scope, the issue didn't seem to be that exaggerated. I viewed objects at 100 yards and adjusted the parallax out then moved to distant objects to check the problem. It was there but manageable. In fact, I noted that setting the parallax to "500" on this particular scope seemed to be a happy place where parallax wasn't too much of an issue at any range past 100 yards.


How the scope will hold up under use is another story. I will send it back to canazes9 and let him add to this thread as he uses the scope.


Summary


All in all I think that this scope is a good value for $300. It functions, the reticle is accurate and the glass was clear




At the same time I tested another scope;









This is a $2,500.00 plus scope for serious long range/tactical/precision shooting. It tracked perfectly up and down the vertical line. Interestingly enough, the click values went astray at the 5 mil line needing 5.1 just as the SWFA did, although it never needed more than .2 more all the way out to 20 mils.