We just finished our first ever PD shoot yesterday and had a ball. I knew this was a learning trip so it's no big deal, the first thing that didn't take long to figure out was we brought waaay too much stuff. The other thing was, I'm not very good at estimating range. I'm sitting in the motel room watching it rain and looking at the Burris Eliminator with the built in laser rangefinder, it's only a 12x but I was wondering if anybody has tried it and how well it worked on PD's.

I've got the Bushnel Yardage Pro 800. It's totally unuseable in flat dog towns. I need a tree or something to range against, then it works very well. I won't pick up a dog mound though. Try yours and let us know how it works. I know the really expensive ones, the $2,000.00 Leica's, etc. work very well, but my pockets aren't quite that deep, but if I was close enough to hunt pd's on a regular basis I would have one.

kend,

One thing about PD hunters......they ALWAYS, sooner or later, get MORE than one PD rifle.

So.....scope your rifle(s) accordingly, and get a separate rangefinder.

Long ago I decided to "invest" in a good rangefinder.....see set-up pic below. You will need a good one, in order to range pds across relatively flat terrain.

Note: A couple of years ago I bought a bit nicer one.

Hope this helps.

Kevin

the only way i know of to become good at estimating distance is to do it. when you are in the field, find landmarks (rock, tree etc.) pace them off so you know their distance, and interpolate when the dogs come out. a pd is so small that i could never afford a rangefinder good enough to range them. plus what has been said before, there is no such thing as having one PD rifle. i can't even think of a time when i took less than a dozen. so far as the bushnell scope goes, well every body has to have something to sell so somebody

quote:

Originally posted by Kevin Gullette:
kend,

One thing about PD hunters......they ALWAYS, sooner or later, get MORE than one PD rifle.

So.....scope your rifle(s) accordingly, and get a separate rangefinder.

Long ago I decided to "invest" in a good rangefinder.....see set-up pic below. You will need a good one, in order to range pds across relatively flat terrain.

Note: A couple of years ago I bought a bit nicer one.

Hope this helps.

Kevin

Kevin,

The reason you aren't complaining is that the unit you have has one of the most narrow vertical beam divergences among LRs. Others may range far, but they don't measure small objects well, esp ones close to the ground.

So what model do you have now?

quote:

Originally posted by Kevin Gullette:
So.....scope your rifle(s) accordingly, and get a separate rangefinder.

Hope this helps.

It would....if I were looking for advice on what you think I should do but I'm not, I'd like to know if anybody has tried the Burris Laserscope on Prairie Dogs. Thanks for the advice but I'd rather know about the Burris.

I've got a Leica 1200 crf and it ranges dog mounds out to 500 just fine.

I shot dogs for 8 hours today using scopes that go from 6-24 to 8-32 & 10-50 power. Because I was shooting alone I never fired a shot without these scopes dialed down to the lowest magnification and was able to witness my hits and spot my misses. If you shoot alone 12x max works fine out to 500 or so.

I'd like to try that burris gizmo once in the PD fields.

To answer your question, no, I doubt that anyone has (puposely) bought and tried a Burris rangefinder scope for prairie dogs.

Only a few of the very best rangefinders will range small objects like prairie dogs (or even their mounds). I'm quite certain that the Burris scope would not be of any utility for this purpose. Such a scope would be nice, but it simply does not exist on the market today, at least not in a practical form and at a price you would be willing to pay.

AZ,

Yep.....the earlier 7X42 Geovid's, at 0.3 milliradians(vertical) by 1.5 milliradians(horizontal), have the finest beam divergence of any laser rangefinder.....that I'm aware of....except, maybe a Russian military unit.

My "newer" rangefinder is the Leica Vector GMD. Many more functions, and a bit further maximum ranging capability......no....I haven't "maxed" them out on a PD yet. Same beam divergence, though. Note: My old ones once spied an individual PD at 662 yards

Kevin

quote:

Originally posted by Stonecreek:
To answer your question, no, I doubt that anyone has (puposely) bought and tried a Burris rangefinder scope for prairie dogs.

Never say never, Stonecreek. In this case there was at least one. I won't name names but I know for a fact the buyer sent it back with a not too polite note about what a piece of crap it was. Same outfit makes all the low end units and brands them for retailers like Burris and Bushnell.
They may provide their own glass but the electronics are the same.

There are a lot of really good long range rangefinders for reasonable money these days but you need to look in forestry service products and/or survey equipment supply house catalogs to find the best products for the least money. They have some really first class units that display inclination, have fluxgate compasses and other usefull goodies for $700-$1000. Many are rated for 1200 yds or farther. One Norwegian outfit has one rated to 14,000 yards but not quite in the same price range.

Tiger: You're certainly correct about the optical functions of most rangefinders. The beam divergence is key, and most of them aren't nearly "tight" enough to range small objects (even if you can hold them still on the small object, which in itself is quite a challenge.)

The "computer" which processes the information returned by the beam is virtually identical in all of them, and is very, very good and almost infallible. Even cheap rangefinders, when used on large, reflective targets, typically show a distance within one yard of what the most expensive ones do.

I read a write up on the Burris Eliminator by a New Zealand gun writer for one of our shooting magazines. He was shooting rabbits with it, I think his biggest issue was that it didn't have any paralax adjustment. Apart from that he seemed to think it was ok.

quote:

Originally posted by tiggertate:
Never say never, Stonecreek. In this case there was at least one. I won't name names but I know for a fact the buyer sent it back with a not too polite note about what a piece of crap it was.

Matches my experience with every product and service from the company in question