Originally Posted by prairie_goat
I'm not a fan of the 3" high way of things, either. If I run into a coyote while deer hunting the midrange trajectory might just put one over it's back. There's a fine line of where to zero, which of course depends on BC, velocity, and all that jazz.

Having an inch or two to work with at 100 is the sweet spot, for me. In most reasonably flat shooting rounds it will give 300 yards of no thought, no LRF needed, pull the trigger to dead animal goodness.


Back in the good old days when I owned one rifle and shot one load, I could do pretty darn well with a duplex reticle in a Weaver V7.

I shot an '06 with a 165 gr ballistic tip over 60 gr of H4831. And I shot it at everything, especially bunches of ground squirrels all summer.

The zero was 300 and there was a drop chart on the stock. It just ain't that tough to hold five or six inches under a ground squirrel to connect at midrange trajectory.

I can not count how many grouse I killed by putting the cross hair right where the neck meets the shoulder. It would cut the head off cleaner than a whistle.

Once I got out past 400, I used the taper of the bottom post. Today I do not remember exactly what the subtension of the fine wire was. But by using the point of the bottom cross wire with hold over/under I could reliably kill rocks out a bit past 600 yds.

We had no rangefinders. When shooting for fun, that is how we honed our range estimation skills. We would guess a range to a rock, and then shoot it. High or low......told us how far off our estimate was.

BDC reticles are nice toys. But we killed a lot of game before they came into existence. And turrets simply have not been reliable enough to trust for very long.

I am pretty sure our sniper units made it through 'Nam with neither.

I had one of the first Redfield Accutrac scopes to hit the market and also a Bushnell BDC back about 1980. Neither would track well enough for reliable use on a varmint rifle. And I demand more from a game rifle than I do a varmint rifle, because the shot matters more.

So I learned to do all I need to with a duplex. It will still do the job if a guy is dedicated enough to learn it.

People who choose to brew up their own storms bitch loudest about the rain.