This is the link to the commercial that got me thinking and made me pick up my calculator and do a bit of trig.

On shot #1 Mr. Waddell is in a bucket truck shooting a hog target and gives the math for the shot. 32 yds line of site @-38 deg. angle = 25 yard hold. This is all dead on but he doesn't say to us that to get to these numbers you must be 58.6 feet up a tree!!!!! In shot #2 his math is for 52 yards line of sight with a -34 deg. angle = 43 yard hold.... well that is only 87 feet up a tree. I understand the feature but how many people think this is a bowhunters dream unit because of this add.

Real world tree stand math is as shown... just trig problems

8 yards up a tree is going to be the constant for line of sight through the rangefinder here.
10 yards hold = 12.8 line of sight and ect below
20 = 21.54
30 = 31.05
40 = 40.8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1QU0EmyjCQ

Good catch Ted! I want to see bow hunters, climb 87 feet into a tree!

damn i'm tired of those forest fairies on TV. wee willie waddel about leads the pack. i think the correct name for those shills is pimps

damn ted
you some kinda math wizard
as well as a good ole' 270 shooter

Ted,

drop the calculator, now step away.
You, sir, have too much time on your hands. Isn't there something to hunt now in Missouraa?

Take a deep breath boys, it is all about marketing.

I'm sixty two.. hunted whitetails when they were wild.. don't know how I ever killed anything with just a rifle, a pocket full of shells and a good knife.. carried a compass some of the time... Les

Ted when those things came out i did exactly what you did, a little A^2 + B^2 = C^2 and came to the conclusion that they are worthless for bowhunters.

for rifle hunters on longer steep angle shots in the mountains, they may be a little more useful, but bowhunters, most folks aren't going to hold steady enough to make that 1 yard difference matter at 25 yards on a live animal anyway.

quote:

Originally posted by cooperjd:
Ted when those things came out i did exactly what you did, a little A^2 + B^2 = C^2 and came to the conclusion that they are worthless for bowhunters.

for rifle hunters on longer steep angle shots in the mountains, they may be a little more useful, but bowhunters, most folks aren't going to hold steady enough to make that 1 yard difference matter at 25 yards on a live animal anyway.

My thoughts to a tee. +1

Excellent point, thanks for sharing! I never did the math but I instinctively felt that they seemed over rated. (Hunting gadgets) are like fishing lures. They catch more (hunters) or fisherman than (animals) or fish.

The correct hold (at least for rifle shooters) is not the straight line distance to the target. Time of flight impacts bullet drop, and while a bullet hits higher on an angled shot, it is not as high as the "straight line distance" would predict.

There was a recent story in Rifle Shooter mag that was really way off. In that story, the author said if the page were scaled in hundreds of yards, and you were on the upper right corner of the page, the distance to the target would be 1300 yards, but you would hold for 775 (the horizontal distance).

Dead wrong. Such a hold would result in your bullet striking 173 inches high. This BS about your bullet only being affected by the horizontal has been regurgitated by just about every shooting/hunting writer out there. If that were true, a bullet fired straight up would go into orbit.

Don't believe it? Plug in some numbers in a ballistics program and see for yourself. The farther the distance and the lower the BC, the greater the error in using the straight line distance.

quote:

Originally posted by cooperjd:
Ted when those things came out i did exactly what you did, a little A^2 + B^2 = C^2 and came to the conclusion that they are worthless for bowhunters.

for rifle hunters on longer steep angle shots in the mountains, they may be a little more useful, but bowhunters, most folks aren't going to hold steady enough to make that 1 yard difference matter at 25 yards on a live animal anyway.

+2 - Seems like whitetail bowhunters are a bigger market than sheep hunters and such.