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Rangefinders with inclinometer

Introduction

Whether you are a golf player, hunter or sports shooter, you might find yourself in a situation where knowing the exact distance to your goal or target is crucial. Laser rangefinders are modern hunting accesories, because they have been in the hands of hunters only for the last decades now. Before that, this equipment was only used for military purposes and was not accessible to public.

While shooting (at game or target), rangefinders are used due to bullet drop at longer distances. Hunter can determine the animal range and therefore get the most appropriate chance of an accurate hit. Distance to your target is the first parameter (out of many) you need to know when shooting long range. When you are on the plains where shooting is more or less horizontal, distance to the target is basically the only geometrical parameter you need to know to be successful. However, the world is not flat, as people believed until Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, nor is perfectly round. Horizontal shots are unfortunately very rare while hunting in the mountains, for example. In such circumstances, knowing the angle between the hunter and the game, becomes really important. Better rangefinders that have built in inclinometers, have the possibility to show also horizontal distance to your target besides the actual (measured) one.

Rangefinders

Line of sight

All old rangefinders were capable of showing only the measured distance to the target – this is called "line of sight."

At a previous time, shooters used ACI (angle cosine indicator) and manually calculated corrections when shooting under angle. However, doing shooting corrections changed lately with the help of new rangefinding technologies.

So, what is actually happening? Do you remember the Pythagorean Theorem? That’s all this is, basically gravity acts on the horizontal distance the bullet travels. Therefore, the measured distance from you to your target multiplied by the cosine of the angle you are shooting, will give you the approximate distance you should be aware of. It is all about a geometric factor that means angular distance does not match line-of-sight distance.

Rangefinders

EHR

Rangefinders that offer measurement of inclination, have a lot of advantages for shooters and hunters. They are able to directly (in real time) calculate the horizontal component of the distance with their ballistic software. Horizontal component of the distance is the only component that matters when shooting and doing bullet-drop compensations and it is much more important than direct, linear distance to target. If you know EHR (equivalent horizontal range), you apply only the number of clicks which would have been needed if target would be set on the horizontal distance, equal to EHR.

So, what is EHR? The expression originally came from German optics manufacturer Leica. It is the name for their solution that combines built in inclinometer and advanced computing method, developed especially for this purpose by Leica. With their EHR solution, a shooter can get info about horizontal component of the distance in all circumstances, no matter the angle between shooter and the target. This is extremely useful for mountain hunters, because horizontal component of the distance is the only one that is needed to calculate bullet drop.

We should also take into consideration that rangefinders can normally display equivalent horizontal ranges only partially, compared to linear distances measure. For example: I use Leica’s Rangemaster CRF 1000-R which can measure distances up to 1.000 meters, but can only show EHR values to approximately 600 meters.

Rangefinders

Correcting factors for EHR

Some manufacturers add different additional correcting factors to their EHR ballistic softwares in order to perfect accuracy, others leave it the way it is – simply geometrical feature. Leupold and Kahles are well known for adding some additional correcting factors and for this reason they name their EHR solutions with different names (TBR – true ballistic range for example by Leupold).

Rangefinders

Conclusion

Main reason of integrated inclinometers in modern rangefinders is definitely ballistics. However, it is probably not the only reason, because there are other purposes and exceptions, too. For example: such devices are also used for golf or in forestry devices where measuring of tree height can be made with simple calculations and such rangefinders with inclinometers.

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