Re. biopods & POI
My wife & I went on a guided 2x1 mule deer hunt some years ago & my wife was shooting a very accurate Remington 725 in .280 R. Upon arriving @ the outfitters ranch we checked our rifles for zero on the outfitters range but our guide wasn't present & we didn't meet him until breakfast the next morning @ 5AM & it was clear that he wasn't thrilled with guiding a woman hunter.
He insisted that my wife put his Harris bipod on her rifle explaining that he had much better luck with women, kids, & new hunters that way. My wife neither a kid or a new hunter & I insisted that we were not putting a bipod on my wife's rifle since she had never used a bipod before & we had not checked zero on the rifle with a bipod installed. After lots of arguing & insistence from him that zero wouldn't change we got our way & my wife hunted w/o a bipod. The guide was really grumpy & unhappy until my wife made a nice one shot kill @ about 225 yds. shooting prone off of her pack on what ended up being one of the nicer bucks taken that year.
Several year later we were planning a combination pronghorn / mule deer hunt & I thought having the option of using a bipod in certain types of terrain wasn't a bad idea so I bought one & checked it out on the rifles we were going to use. On my rifle, a custom M70 .280 R in a composite stock the POI didn't change significantly with the bipod and I did kill a nice pronghorn using the bipod but with previously mentioned .280 Remington 725 of my wife's (which was factory stocked w/ tip pressure) the POI was about 5" low @ 100 yds shooting off the bipod compared to shooting off sandbags or prone off a daypack.
