Home Forums Hunting & Shooting AR and Tactical Rifles Scope help needed

I have a Remington 700 heavy barrel 308 with a Leupold scope that has been a great setup for me. Until now I have mainly use the gun in side 200 yards, however, I recently joined a rifle range that allows me to shoot out as far as 600 yards. I have little knowledge of how these Tactical Systems work on Scopes so any help would be appreciated. I see that the knobs are marked at one MOA so any explanation of the adjustment process would be very helpful.

Couple questions need answered before you can start to get a decent answer:

What reticle do you have in the Leupold? Is the scope a First Focal, or Second Focal plane scope?

The knobs work the same on hunting scopes as they do on "tactical" scopes, an MOA adjustment is the same on both.

Tactical scopes - in your case, the Leupold Mark IV - are supposed to be better at dialing knobs for extended range corrections. Reality - all scopes should be repeatable, and calibrated correctly, but this is not always true. Usually, there are some pretty strong opinions posted here on this topic, and some are based on extended experience.

You need to know you bullet weight, muzzle velocity, and the ballistic coefficient or the bullet type to start on your range corrections.

Get a Shooter's App for your smart phone, this will get you started without much problem.

Based on the answers above, you can either - dial the correction into your scope, or use the calibration marks in the reticle to "hold-over" the target, and leave the dials alone.

How do you define your need for accuracy? MOA of deer, MOA of the X ring, or MOA is close enough?

The scope has a mil dot reticle and I am not sure if it is a first or second focal plane.. Is there a way to tell?

My biggest question with the turrets pertains to 1 MIN... Is this equal to .25 inches at 100 yds like a standard hunting scope?

I hand load and I am shooting 150 grain nosler ballistic tips using RL 15. While I don't have a chronograph I can get a decent idea of velocity by referring to the loading manual.

I use the Norman ballistics app so I know what the bullet is doing at longer distances.

I wont' shoot an animal past 300 yards, however, I would like to ring a metal plate at 500-600 yds if I can figure things out.

I am the second owner of this scope and got it from a friend who was in bad need of money so he made me an offer I can't refuse.

Thanks for your help!

Glad to, we all started as novices - I still am.

First Focal Plane - the mil-dot reticle will appear to grow and shrink in the field of view as the magnification power is changed.

Second focal plane - the reticle size in the view stays the same through the magnification range.

99% likely - you have a Mark IV with a second focal plane.

No issues - both work, but with a second focal plane, the reticle is calibrated to equal the MOA scale at full power of magnification.

In layman terms - at max scope magnification - the reticle spacing "should" equal MOA spacing on the target at 100 yards. You'll have to get the Leupold information on their mil-dot reticle specs, and what the spacing is between the dots, and the dot-width. It's on their website, or somebody here will have it as well.

An MOA is actually 1.047 inches. For 99.5% of the shooting world, it's an inch.

So, I shoot a 168 grain Sierra Matchking bullet - plain jane Federal ammo - with a 200 yard zero.

My generic rough-math correction for 600 yards is about 12.1 MOA up.

I can either:

A. dial the 12 MOA into the elevation turret, and add fuzz of hold-over, and shoot the cross hair on target, or

B. use the calibrated marks on the reticle's vertical post to "hold-over" the cross hairs above the target/point of impact.

You have exposed turrets on the Mark IV, so changing the elevation is pretty easy. Most hunting scopes have capped turrets - you could do the same thing in theory with a hunting scope, but it would not be as easy.

All this said, be prepared to find out that your scope is not doing an exact 1 MOA (edited) adjustment, as many scopes do not, and you may need to make some corrections to the numbers for the Norma app to get on target at extended ranges.

It is a second focal plane. The adjustments are 1moa per click for elevation, and .5moa per for windage. That means that it should adjust 1 inch per click of elevation and .5 inch per click of windage at 100 yards. It is actually in MOA, not IPHY....

That scope is not very reliable and durable, and very often they do not track and adjust correctly. Having said that, you can certainly use it to shoot with.

Thanks Form - I figured you'd have that information at hand.

Hate to say it but since you're new to this stuff, that scope is going to be confusing and difficult for you to learn; not because of the mil dot reticle but because the reticle and turrets are in different units, mil vs moa. Both are angular measurement systems, but different units, like combining metric and inch measurements. You'll have to get good at converting mils to moa if you want to take full advantage of that scope; more trouble than it's worth IMO.

It would be a lot easier for you to learn on a mil/mil or moa/moa setup, so that 1 mil on the turret corresponds to 1 mil on the reticle (or moa). The mil dot reticle is handy and easy to use if the turrets match the reticle.

So assuming the bullet is traveling in the trajectory listed then at 500 yards I would be 55 inches low and would need to adjust 55 clicks to get somewhere near the target?

I may have replacement turrets that match. I will have to check but I would have never known there is a difference. I think right now I'm going to just focused on adjusting the turrets to get where I need to be. Would that be the best suggestion?

Umm...no.

Remember that the Minute of Angle (MOA) is an angle, the size of the area covered by the far end (downrange) of the angle increases with range of the target, it's a thin wedge of pie that gets larger at the end as you increase the distance.

The wide end of the pie covers more distance the further you go out.

1 MOA equals 1 MOA of viewed vertical distance ( about an inch) at 100 yards, the same 1 MOA viewed through the scope equals 2 MOA (about 2 inches) of vertical distance at 200 yards, 3 MOAs is about 3 inches at 300, and on.

At 500 yards, your 1 MOA covers 5 vertical inches of the target, each one MOA of correction moves the bullet 5 inches at 500 yards.

If the calculated bullet drop is 55 inches, you are going to add 11 MOA clicks of the vertical scope elevation to get on target.

There's probably a simpler way to say this, but you get the idea.

I like an App called "Shooter", it will give you the inches of drop, and the MOA correction side by side on your screen.

Ha! At 55 clicks I would hit the next town! This makes a lot more sense now. I will check out that Shooter app for sure

Do not think in "inches" anymore. Think in minutes of angle (MOA). Download the app from above "Shooter" and set everything up in MOA. Then when a shot calls for 5.5MOA, just spin the turret to "5".


The best thing you could do is to email SWFA and trade that scope in for one of their 3-9x42mm SS's with mil-Quad reticle. You will spin more time skull raping this one then you will shooting.

I think that is the quote of the day...

Not really; that's OK if you only want to learn how to dial elevation, but you miss a lot of the benefits. The reticle and turrets are a system that should work together. Yours doesn't, without some extra math.

Put it this way (for a very rough example): You shoot (distance doesn't matter) and through the mil-dot reticle see that you missed 2.8 mils low. With mil turrets, you can adjust 2.8 mils. With MOA turrets, how much do you adjust?

Or this one - your dope chart says you need 5.3 moa into the wind for a 620 yard shot, but you want to hold for wind instead of dial. How many mils do you hold? Quickly, you don't have long to make the shot...

Of course there are workarounds by either dialing or holding over in either case, but hopefully that makes it clear how your combination is far from ideal, and makes an easy concept far more complex. It's shameful of Leupold to have built mil/moa scopes IMO, but they still do.

This is somewhat like driving a car on American roads with a metric (kilometers) speedometer, only more complicated.

Would I actually trade the scope with swfa or do I need to sell it private party?

Ben,

SWFA will trade the Leupold scope in on the SWFA 3x9, but be prepared for a bath on it - that's been my experience with their trade program. They are definitely not going to give you full market value for it.

You'd be better off selling the Leupold outright, and buying the SWFA scope. SWFA does a good Black Friday sale if you can wait a month for it.

There's a SWFA 3x9 listed now in the Classified, from a good member:

https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbt...27335/wts-swfa-ss-3-9x42-hd#Post12327335

Now the big question... what is a reasonable price for my scope for a private party sale?

Need the specs on your Mark IV - range of magnification, size of the objective end, caps, a picture of the end of the Leupold box is easiest solution if you have it.

Not doubting, but I've traded several scopes through them and each time I got about what market would stand- at least within $20-$30.

I would at least try it.

I still have the box