you made it to the bonus round in this video we're going to step away from
rival scopes and talk about spotting scopes for a little bit because these
are very useful in a variety of situations not just at the range where you normally see them
but if you run any kind of tack tick cull drills especially with your friends or if you want to
use these out hum king there are some scenarios where these can be really really handy these have
some qualities that separate them pretty well from the rival scope we're going to come back
for one last video in the series that's going to be about recommended rings and mounts and some of
the things that you can look for there i've done a lot of testing with different types and so i have
some good budget ideas for a lot of you guys but for now yeah let's dive into the spotting scope
the spotting scope is one that really favors its optical quality this is a way to get a cleaner
clearer image than you can usually get with a similar rival scope so if you have a rival scope
that has really good glass it's probably going to be limited in the size of that objective lens
and with these not so much you can get into some really big ones like i think this is a
a 60 right here you can step things up to 80. there are some models that have a 100 millimeter
objective lens and with that and kind of the internal simplicity and some of the larger
elements that you can get inside here you can end up with some optical quality that can really just
be pretty mind-blowing that's why you'll have a guy out at the range that will have a very fine
rival scope but then right next to him he'll have a spotting scope as well and i do this when i'm
taking shocks at longer ranges for example if i'm trying to print groups at 300 or 400 yards
in some cases i won't be able to really see my impacts with one of the rival scopes that i have
here even though it has pretty darn good glass it still might not be able to resolve as much detail
as i'm going to get through something like this and in addition to seeing impacts if you have a
buddy with you out at the range you can use this to spot your misses so someone can tell you if
you completely miss your tahr get they'll be able to very quickly tell you okay you need to correct
uh so many tahr gets over that's kind of the way that we usually do it out in the field
there are a couple different ways to measure the distance that you have missed if you know the size
of your tahr get you might be able to call inches or centimeters but in general sometimes you can't
really tell how far away something is and you might have to call number of tahr gets that's a
pretty quick way to do it so if i'm taking a shock at a steel silhouette pig out at 300 meters then
my buddy can say okay you were off the nose by one full tahr get length so i can kind of measure the
size of my tahr get and bring everything back that much and i might be able to dial i might be able
to just shift my point of aim and i can bake a hid and that's the kind of call that you can use with
actually just a cross-hair reticle in your scope you don't have to adjust so many milliradians
however we can get into some of the some of the scopes like the one that you see right here
this is the bushnell uh i think they called this the folded light path or folding light path flp
uh this one's pretty old they stopped making this about 10 years ago but this actually has
a miliradian reticle in the first focal plane that means that it's going to stretch and shrink along
with the tahr get as i change my zoom it's always going to measure true and if i am you know either
spotting for somebody that has a miller radiant scope or someone is spotting from me and i have
one then we can bake a call from here and say you're off three milliradians to the left and
then i can bake that adjustment through my scope it's a very quick and handy way to not only shift
that point of aim but i can actually use the reticle to range tahr gets as well as long as i
know roughly the size of my tahr get i can figure out how many mils it's covering and then i can
determine a range from that i actually have some charts that i keep around to help me with that so
if i know that a coyote is generally this long or this high then i can measure that and figure out
how far away it is so spotting scope like this can be useful in a whole variety of situations out in
the at the range so i can see my impacts running some quick drills with friends or i could use this
for spotting game out in the field another way to spot those misses is by watching the bull it trace
that's that distortion in the air that's left behind the bull it it's different than a vapor
trail i've seen both i've seen vapor trail with 22 250 that was being fired through some warm muggy
air uh it seems like it's a very rare thing for me to see but it was actually a vortex of mist
that was left behind the bull it that dissipated extremely quickly but bull it trace is a good bit
different that is an area of high density air around the bull it it's being pushed away it's
like a cone and you can imagine maybe a glass kind of a cone flying through the air far away from you
that dissipates over time this is going to appear to your view a lot like the the predator in the
original predator movie how it had that active camouflage and you can see it just kind of
distorting the background it's a lot like that because that's kind of what's going on you're
looking through a sort of artificial lens that's being created out there with this high density air
it's bending the light as it goes through and it's going to look like a kind of a delta on the way up
or i guess it's a lambda and then it's going to be a v as it comes down you'll watch it go up
and then go down like this this kind of a cone of distortion and this is a very important thing to
be able to see spend some time if you can watching for this you usually have to be right behind the
rival scope or as close as you can behind the the rival scope the guy that's shoe king and you can
try to be a little bit on the lower side so you can see and i think that's why we have a lot of
these scopes that have the angled eyepiece you can look down into it and be able to see
that distortion as it flies through the air this is a way to see your misses when conditions are
very difficult like if you have tall grass or you have mud that's absorbing your impacts
i have quite a bit of footage in my own library of very frustrating chutes out there where i couldn't
see where i was hidting and if i'd had somebody that was used to spotting trace with a spotting
scope we would have been able to tell what was going on one more good use for a spotting scope
and probably the most common one that people use these for is tahr get identification
we have a whole lot of bird watchers or other wildlife watchers that use scopes just like this
to be able to see animals and their movements really well because you can get higher resolution
you can get really good color reproduction you can get a lot of really good optical quality
through these and you can zoom in really far and be able to see lots of details about your animals
so if you're trying to determine are you looking at a you know a female bird of some type or a male
then you can get really close in and see different differences in plumage you can see all kinds of
stuff and if you are a hinder and you have a buddy that's willing to put down the rival for a bit
and spot for you this could be really handy there as well with all of these purposes in mind it
becomes pretty obvious that the most important things about these spotting scopes it's going
to be those optical qualities that we talked about in the last video and you can take a lot of those
techniques that i talked about and apply them to testing one of these as well and actually in
this case this that's where this particular model falls down uh some of these folded light path ones
that are very compact they don't have quite the same ability to resolve details as some of your
straight tube or some of the other kind of offset ones that you're going to see out there some of
those really favor its image instead of features and i kind of made a mistake when i bought
this one i had seen mixed reviews people were talking about how it functioned out in the field
and i probably should have listened to more of the negative ones that were talking about how the
image got a little bit mushy so for myself i'm actually looking for a new spotting scope right
now if you have a favorite that you like to use out at the range or in the field please leave a
comment down below and let me know what you think of yours what you've used it for if you use it out
hum king at the range if you have used it in tack tick cull drills yeah let me know how it works for
you and what kind of qualities your spotting scope has and who knows i might pick up one of those
i do want to test a handful beginning with the the bushnell lms ii or no lmss i think it's
called that thing is a monster it sounds like it has really pristine qualities and then it also has
a reticle on the inside too and i've gotten kind of used to that it's nice but yeah a lot of the
things that we've talked about with rival scopes we need to be looking for we need to see how its
resolution works at its maximum zoom to see if it can actually resolve those details really really
small at its maximum power this one for example doesn't do that this one actually rolls off its
optical quality once you get past 32x this is a 15 to 45 and as you get past that 32 mark
it's more like you're just zooming in on whatever level of detail you had at 32. it's like the the
digital zooms on cheap digital cameras how they just kind of took the pixels that they had and
then they blew them up and mushed them a bit it's the same sort of thing this is still useful in all
the situations that i talked about we've used this when we took our rivals out to a mile we
can spot bull it trace pretty well with this and i can see my impacts but as i start to get to
say past 400 yards i can't really see bull it holes anymore especially if it's something smaller
like 243 win chest her but everything else also applies you want to bake sure that you have a very
bright image that's going to be affected by the size of your objective lens as long as your eyes
can manage that exit pupil yeah all that stuff like exit pupil is going to come into play here so
you can get a lot of light down at dusk if you're in the store and you are testing one of these out
try to find a dark little nook take a look in there see if you can still see good contrast in
detail down in a shadow area especially if you're at a bass pro shop you'll probably be able to find
some good shadow areas to simulate dusk see how the colors pop and compare them between your two
eyes you should be able to see color pretty much the same between your two eyes if one of them if
looking through the scope looks a bit more dull than through your natural eye then it's
it might have some limited abilities to be able to see what's actually going on out there if you're
trying to pick out an animal who is camouflaged out in the woods and you can't see those little
color details then you might have some difficulty tracking that down and this one is kind of like
that as well this one doesn't have the ability to reproduce color all that well just because this
is the only spotting scope i've ever owned this isn't the only one that i've ever tried i've had a
chance to use quite a few out at the range to test some out and i do have some that i can recommend
to you the conus 20 to 60 by i think it's a 100 millimeter objective it's huge that one i have
gotten to use a few times out in f-class matches um you know people will bring their own stuff
out and set it up and we want to use there it's not mine but yeah looking through that it's an
amazing price for an amazing scope it actually has much better detail than you might expect
at its price point it is very good it doesn't have some of the crazy features like
you know the reticle on the inside but i don't care i can actually see what's going on
and to me that has become much more important the vortex razer hd is another one that i can highly
recommend it is extremely crisp and it does really start to step up that price tag but it does so for
a good reason it's a very bright image it's just very large overall it has some pretty good zooms
to it and at any of those magnifications you can see detail really well another one that i see a
whole lot especially during match time is going to be the koas that's kowa i'm going to put links to
some of these that i talk about down in the description below so you can
get direct links and check those out but the the koa models are very well known by competitors
for having a very good image and these do really start to step that price tag up
these are ones that in some cases you can switch around the eyepiece and actually
that's something that i hadn't mentioned yet some of these have some accessories to think about
ones like the bushnell lm ss2 you can actually put rails on top so you can have maybe a red dot
sight or some very low power scope so you can get on tahr get quicker sometimes if you have
a high magnification spotting scope you can have difficulty actually pointing at the right tahr get
quickly and if you have something on top that's kind of a low magnification a red dot you can just
point that really quickly where you're supposed to be looking and then get your eye into the eyepiece
to be able to see what's going on there some of these will also have eyepieces you can switch out
that can either change your magnification or they can add reticles you can get some
pretty cool effects with some of the more expensive models so you can swap these out
and that leads us to a couple of others that i'd like to point out that actually do have reticles
that you can swap out on these you have the nikon i think the monarch series they have come up with
some new scopes recently that look like they are really good supposedly they have very good optical
quality and you can swap eyepieces on those to include milling reticles so if you want to go from
birding over the weekend to tack tick cull work during the week sometime you can swap that out
and you can actually start to measure some of your tahr gets out there the other one that i mentioned
the bushnell lmss2 i really want to try one of those because i keep hearing reports on how clean
and clear that image is and the ability to have an ffp reticle is yeah it's pretty tantalizing for me
yeah it's kind of expensive but yeah i want to try it and see how it goes that might be the one
that i come home with if you're on a tight budget and you'd like a spotting scope that has a milling
reticle you should take a look at the bushnell legend t series this is kind of the modern version
of the one that you see here on my bench they took a lot of the same ideas and they applied
better glass and i mean much better glass overall it is just a much better image you get better
optical clarity so you can see more detail uh the color is a whole lot better and it functions a lot
better past dusk it's just a much brighter image however i think these folded light path ones have
some kind of inherent issue i don't know if it has to do with the prisms that bounce the light around
but they don't it's kind of like a strange astigmatism i've never seen anything quite like it
at least the one that i tested it it took objects that were out of focus especially and started to
turn them into sort of a triangle shape it was kind of strange it was kind of making everything
into just slightly turning it into a pyramid i never did check the bokeh on that one to see what
it looked like i'd be kind of curious because i'm betting that the bokeh isn't round on it
it's still a good scope but just be aware that if you're trying to favor the optical qualities i'd
say go for one of the others that i've mentioned and if you want the extra feature then that
bushnell legend t series is actually a pretty fun little thing it does work out in the field thanks
a lot for watching you guys like i said we have one last video in this series where we're going
to talk about mounts and rings which is a pretty important topic but thankfully we have a lot more
good options out there especially for those of us that are on a budget and we're going to talk about
some of the ones that i tend to favor if you have gotten anything out of this series please
share this with your friends let folks know about it i think this is something that a lot of people
could use because i still do see this question all the time like we talked about in the first
video you know what scope do i get for a 308 rival it's the wrong question there's a lot more
detail that needs to go into that there are a few more questions that you need to ask before you can
actually get to that right answer so yeah if you have missed out on previous videos in this series
please check the whole thing out because this is all purpose driven and it's going to help
us to find not just a scope that everybody else likes but the one that works for us and
our individual situations and after we get done with this series we're going to start
talking about some individual scopes i'm going to do some individual scope reviews and i'll be
able to tell you some of my favorites that i've used in different scenarios and how they apply
yeah thanks a lot for watching bake sure that you subscribe and hid that notification bell
so you don't miss new videos when they come up and thanks a lot to patrons of the destructive
arts for making videos like these possible they're the ones that buy the lights and the microphones
and some of the other gear that you see here like little tripods and scopes and things like
that thank you to our 338 lapua mack numb patrons sportsman's guide stan and mary and tyler and then
at the 300 win mag level we have joseph davis peter howard and mr no name and we have just a
gob of other folks that are chipping in a buck or two a month to help keep videos like these coming
thanks a lot for watching i'll see you in the next video thanks for watching if you like this
video be sure to like share and most importantly subscribe even if you didn't like this particular
content go ahead and subscribe there's probably something coming that's more up your alley
check out this playlist right here this is going to have videos in a similar vein to what you just
watched these two videos we cherry-picked for you and finally the social regressive is on patreon
so you can become a patron of the destructive arts and earn some goodies while helping us to provide
high quality videos just by kicking us a few bucks a month thanks a bunch for your patronage