00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome everyone. This is the Meat Eater podcast. We're gonna talk about binoculars, which I'd like to call knockers, and rifle scopes an all manner of hunting optics. We're joined right now by joined by or with no joined by Doug dern Douglas dern Um and we're on Doug's family farm, Kasinovia, Wisconsin, the Fame Driftless Area. This is the second installment of the Meat Eater podcasts ever been recorded. These have been recorded in many states, now many states. You get a lot of You get a lot of states for your buck on this show. And y honest you tell us multiple countries as well, multiple countries. Also by y Honest You tell us. Um, I can't mention Yann's name without encouraging you to go to his website and by one of his t shirts. Thank you hunting dot Com twenty four bucks in stock now, also by Mark Bordman and Paul Nice from Vortex Optics. I wish we had the technological capability to broadcast live and take calls. I hate that kind of thing, but it would be good or Knox people call in and ask optics questions, you know. Instead we will think of optics questions and the first one I want to ask, and this is not this isn't the main thing I want to focus on. But we just we hunted turkeys this morning. Do you guys sell a lot of scopes to guys that hunt turkeys? I just don't get it. It's it's I know, I shouldn't say that because you guys are in the scope business, but I don't see. But other than it saves people from themselves and it makes them aim, I don't see. I don't see. Is that a big part of your business. No, No, that's truly not. We we sell a lot of red dot sites, and the red dot sites are probably you know, a little bit kilm, and I think guys will use those. But you know is you know, it's just it's a it's a style of sight that projects an LED onto a curve screen and so you simply see a red dot, a single dot. It's just used it, you know, short range typically it doesn't. No, No, it's not a projected image. Is you view through it, it seems as though it floats out in front of the gun, but it's it's not a projected image like a laser would be for example, and what do you call like, just explain that difference. Where you see where you got a light that shoots out, Yeah, that would be that would be a laser. And the difference would be if you if you look in many fish and game regulations, for example, a projected light is typically illegal to use. And that's you know, that is a laser beam. So if you if you were using that, say on a turkey, and you look, there would actually be a red dot on the on the dude next you. Someone else could see it just as well. Right, Mostly that stuff just probably found on like the pistols and stuff, right for defense, Yeah, it is. It's used on handguns a lot. You know. The the advantage to red dot site it's it's very quick and easy to use. You know, they're not you don't have to line anything up um the way that they operate their their parallax free. So when I'm talking about the actual laser one, where would you find that one? Ah? Yeah, handguns? Defensive guns, that's right. It's not like military and Lawford for for hunting stuff. Right. So people will call up Vortex though, We'll be like, hey man, I wanna a red dot site for shooting turkeys. Yeah, they might say I want a red dot site from my shotgun, you know, but it's something that you know, turkeys would be one of the primary application you can side in with one of those, right. Yeah, So you're going like because we bet we were just trying to explain it to their Dave, like, I think enough guy, guys don't do enough of this. Turkey hunters don't do enough of shooting the shotgun. And you're just like, if you're gonna be serious about not if you're gonna be serious if you're gonna go turkey hunting, I think you just at some point you gotta take a piece of paper out there, put a magic marker circle on it and just see what happens, because you will see where it is just always the pattern could be that if you were to make the center of the pattern at forty yards, I think could be I don't know more inches consistently left right, high low. If you had that, you didn't want to always remember I was just reading this thing by this guy the other day. He says, my whole life, I've been aiming high left on turkeys. Because he's you know, you are using too. They're just using a you know, a shotgun with an elevated rib and a bead and they're they're just trying to basically center that beat on top of the rib. But you know, you move your head a little bit one way or the other, and you know that pattern throws exactly differently. So yeah, you could actually get like, if you want to start shooting turkeys at seve in the eight yards, like you know, with the right chokes and right loads, people can do. Imagine that that red dot site that would be helpful because you can you can turn that thing in. You know, it would definitely become an advantage of that point. And you talk about, you know, patterning your shotgun. If you really want to figure out, you know, what what the loads are doing that you're pushing through your shotgun, you know red dots, that would be you know, fantastic for that because you're gonna maintain that consistent point errors exactly exactly and you might find, yeah, like your high left or its stringing a particular way, and you might find that you want to change the turkey load that you've been using, you know, and find a better one. We have the other day me and you're honest where we had some very inexperience first time turkey hunters, very inexperienced shooters and experienced hunters going turkey hunt. We're like, well, let's gonna shoot a couple of targets. I'm telling you what. Yeah, the first shot on a piece of paper, you would this guy would have never killed that turkey. No, I would have missed him clean. You would have been like, what in the world happened? You know? It wound up being user air. And what's funny is at one point he had he didn't know, but he had the gun on safe and he thought he had it on like he got up and never put it on fire. So which is instructive because when he pulled that triggar that gun Joe way to the right, it never went off, you know. And that's like I remember Yeaest was talking about a tricker. You just tell you give someone a shell, it's no good. No, you give him a rifle with with or without, you know, cartridge in the chamber that was ready to go when it's not ready to go. Yeah, and you just kind of go through a couple with a couple without, and you know, pretty soon you don't know what's gonna you just base our hand today rifle. You are treating it as it's live and you're you need to aim at the target and squeeze the trigger and you'll quickly see who flinches and he does who's the I see with myself, I've been shooting my entire life. But I'll see now and then I'll have something like that happened, and I'll be like, I clearly moved that. I clearly moved that chakraun and it didn't go bang because I whatever. You know, you if you shoot enough, you you generally know to some extent you know if you pulled that shot a little bit. But that's where I can see the red dot thing is we were trying to because we had a guy today, UM hit a turkey that fell down and got it ran away. I think it's okay to name names. No one's gonna know. I mean, all right, Doug's best during best well, Doug's protegee, d protege doctor protegee. UM doesn't have a huge the great guy doesn't have a huge technical interest in hunting equipment and gear and whatnot. Roll to turkey and UM, I wonder like, were the red dot if you would have been being like, you know, one thing, you know, you think you think about when you when you aim for a fine spot, and that you know, that does definitely increase that tendency to pick a spot and aim for and on a turkey course, guy is gonna center that up on the head and the neck. And but just having that small dot, you know, I think it would make a guy maybe concentrated a little more on that. Um. The other kind of anything about the red dots is you know, when you look, you have a small window to look through that's about an inch square, so and it's it's kind of a neat thing wherever that you can see the dot and you can move your head around from side to side and up and down and and the because the device is parallax free, as long as you see the dot visually, whether it's down the corner of the right corner, you'd think it would drift, but it doesn't. It stays constant to the image. And so all you have to you know, as as soon as you pick that dot up in that field of view and it's on targeted, you're you know, you're good to shoot, even if it's not centered in the window. It's so they're you know, they're quick and they're friendly to you. Explain parallax. That's one of the the things I was going to say needs to be I never actually understood parallax till I kind of understood it. But when did we spent I spent a long time on the phone call my own analogy. We could probably spend a whole hour just talking about So we don't want to, we don't want to, but but parallaxes, you know, it's it's the it's the shift of that radical or that point of aim on the target. And depending on where the focuses are the the device or set at that that point of aim can move around on the target at different distances. And so you know, it leads to inaccuracy. Let me let me just let me stop going side in the state like to to to the to the listener. Imagine that you're looking at you're looking at the rifle scope and you got the cross air center on the bull's eye something that had that's not parallax adjusted. You could move your eye around so you got the crosstairs or of the bull's eye. You could move your eye around still keeping your eye looking through the scope, you can move your eye around and there would be a perhaps perceptible maybe inperceptible to you, but the cross hair will have some movement. Yeah, it will be. It will appear almost to just to float around and move depending on where the eye is behind the And when people talk about like for that reason when people talk about consistently shoulder and you're gunn and doing everything the same way all the time, is if you bring your face you could feasibly sight your gun in. Then bring your faith to the to your rifle and do your cheek well and look through the scope and you might be different than you normally are, but still look like you're dead nuts, but you're not because and so parallax is a thing that can fix that. And I'll talk about like fifty yards, hundred yards, rim fire all that stuff. Yeah, there's you know, parallax. Depending on where an optic is is set at when it's assembled or some of them have adjustable lenses that that can be adjusted. They'll be set for a particular distance. So in a big game hunting scope that's that's non adjustable. Typically they would be said at a hundred yards distance. As you focus on something closer further than a hundred you can see some of that parallax movement. Some rifle scopes have adjustments, either an an adjustable objective out on the far end of the scope or a side focus. You guys make anything that doesn't we make. We make both. We do both. The advantage is to a you know, a scope that does not have any sort of adjustment is typically they're they're simpler, they're less expensive for a lot of guys. You know, a guy deer hunting in this country here, for example, you know you're probably not gonna shoot much beyond two d yards that it doesn't come into play as far as hunting accuracy. You're you're not going to get enough shift to you know, to miss the lethal zone on a deer. If a if a rifle scope, a magnified optic is going to have a parallax adjustment on it of some fashion, it'll generally not always be a scope that's ten power or more, just because that that parallax becomes more of a factor chat greater distances. In a room fire scope, we'll have a fixed yeah, might have what you can imagine on a rampire scope. Of courses you're shooting shorter distances. So a typical rim fire range might be twenty five out to fifty yards or so. And so when we we have a couple that we do and we would set those at fifty yards, and so there's you know, at fifty the right on the money is you come in closer than fifty, you could have a little bit of shift, and as you go up beyond fifty, you could have a little bit of shift too, But it brings it closer to sort of the practical range that a rim fire shot at. You know, when I was trying to explain all this stuff in writing, the image that kept the stuck in my head is like, let's say you're you're in the passenger seat of a car good example, good example, and you're looking at the spedometer right, and from your perspective it looks like you're going thirty five for the knee those themes that be from the driver's perspective you're going for just looking at different angles. That's that's not entirely right, but it kind of is a little know what it does because what happens if you if you if you were to sort of look at the mechanics of that spenometer, and the needle is obviously it's it's come off the plate of the surface, and that sort of represents that that internal gap in in parallax in the scope if the scope is focused correctly. If we had that scope that was set at a hundred yards and you were shooting at a hundred yards effectively in your example, the needle of the spedometer would be just flush with a backplate an incident. You know, no matter which angle you looked at, it all the same speed. Yeah, all right, so round rifle scopes. Prior to the next rifle scope. We're gonna take a quick break, alright, So still on the subject, rival and yahn jump in, man, jump in what you want. But I'm gonna jump to And this one isn't like, this isn't a huge thing because I don't get a lot of quiet. Like I'm in some way trying to relay to you guys, questions that we get from people to watch Mediator or whatever, listen to the show, or just people who are looking for advice. Okay, this is one that doesn't get asked that much. Let's not spend a ton of time on it. But why in the hell did scopes used to have a one inch okay the tube. Everything used to be like a one inch tube, or maybe I'm wrong, it feels like it was. No, there's still lots of one inch tubes. And now you see like one inch and you can pick you can buy a scope like suck X scope and one inch or thirty millimeter why or larger? Yeah? Like what like? And there are even some forty millimeter tubes out there if you can believe that. So and you got to match the tube with your rings that you purchased. So why why did Why did this is just some people can sell more stuff. Well if you if you go you know, if you track it back far enough. It was just as as sort of this the scope industry get going and built scopes in the United States. Traditionally one inch was just sort of adopted as as as a common size that companies were using. In Europe, thirty millimeter was was adopted. And you know, those those two numbers are actually not too far apart. They were they were sort of a practical size and dimension to sit on top of a of a rifle. So we're the crowd shooting at American gis with millions during world War two. That's a really good question. My dad never forgave the Germans how many millimeters is one inch? Then? So I can the gap. It's twenty five point four, so it's four point you know, small small difference in there. There are some you know, what's really interesting about that question, and widely misunderstood, is that there are some there are some differences between the two. The big misconception about that is that the larger tube provides a brighter image to the shooter, and that's it really isn't true that that really has nothing to do with a tube size. So what are you getting for what? Well, again, the history is that it was just one size used in one area another another. But there are some advantage of when you look at these scopes that go from one inch to thirty to thirty four to thirty five, obviously that tube is getting bigger and bigger. Seeing a cutout of a rifle scope would would help to make this easier. But inside the scope there's a there's another tube inside there. It's called an erector tube, and it can It contains the zoom lenses and the erecting lenses which which flip and invert the image that tube has to move inside the main tube of the SCUPE. So it effectively it's it pivots and moves up and down, and that's controlled by the turrets on the scope. And so what a larger scope tube can allow, not necessarily, but it can allow is a greater swing of movement inside for that erector tube. And so for the guys that shoot very long distances, they need to be able to adjust for a lot of bullet drop at extreme distance. And so the more internal swing is available in the scope, the more the scope can handle that sort of thing. So there are some theoretical advantages there. Now I had I had no idea. That depends that's what it was. Yeah, well it's you know, if you think heavier, bigger scope, bigger rings. Yeah, but it depends on the relationship to if you think about it between that outer tube and that inner tube, and if the if the inner tube grows at the same rate the outer tube does and the and the movement is the same, well then there's no advantage to it. So that has to you know, you need to increase that gap inside what percentage of what do you guys sell? It's it's because you guys kind of like you guys push the thirty You guys seem to like the totally wrong. No, not necessarily. We sell a lot of one issues we have. We we have a pretty strong emphasis on long range stuff. That's a that's a big focus of workings. So in that view, those typically are are going to be thirty millimeter or thirty four and some of the big tactical scopes we do like a long excuse me, like a long range scope that will generally start like at thirty millimeter, Like that would be like generally your starting point and then like Paul said, you'd go up into you know, potentially a thirty four even a thirty five. Have you guys started making we do? Yeah, we do right now. We have both thirty four and thirty five millimeter two scopes. The thirty five is part of our Razor series. That scope, for example, has been used in some of these really extreme long range three thirty eight lapooh magnums, you know, fifty b mgs where guys are shooting out past two thousand yards with it. They're getting tremendous bullet drop, so they need a way to compensate for that. We had a guy with that scope that had a confirmed engagement with a target. Excuse me, and I want to say two point zero seven miles if I remember correct, like an actual like a combat situation. No, it was, it was, I mean it was. It was. It was like at a out of range like you know, but but it was like you know, a big metal plate point seven miles. That's a long way out there, two point zero seven miles. Yeah. Wow, that's a poke though, But so he used, I want to say, and you know, I could be quoting us incorrect, shooting a something three farms over. What's your head? What's your thing doing? Way up there, Doug? I was just listening and I thought, you know, I'm gonna start breathing heavy because of all this scope talk, and you know, starts getting tis get me so excited. So I just took the microphone away so I could have a little time with myself over here. Anyways, like shooting before, Doug durn Fell sleep be shooting a deer in town from the long drive, Well, Doug's place here, I bet you'd be pushing it to get a three yard shot. Probably you might have a spot or two, but you know, and so we think about that to two point oh seven miles. That's in the neighborhood. A third five hundred yards. I remember while as a kid my brother shot at deer hundred seventy yards. Seemed like this infathomable distance. It was like unfathoml distance. My father shot a deer on this farm at a quarter of a mile all the way across the forty one shot. So there's there. He stretched it further than that. That is why he is known as the quarter mile buck hunter. He's got it on a hat, all right. Yeah, and he's throwing a good optics question you see all the time to keep him with scopes. We'll switch to knockers later. Yeah. Um, like all the distinctions, Yeah, I just had a good one. Well yeah, the main one being like, no, you go ahead. I don't want to stop. I don't want to take your turn. No go ahead, I'll think of a better one. Dog got dog jumping in with the optics question. So I have vortex optics on my rifles. Say, say I run vor Tex optics. Do you want to sound cool as ship? I run flortex optics on my rifles, and uh is cooler? I noticed that when you hang out with Steve Rinella. After a while you start talking like him and well you know that, No, there's a cadence and everything. Uh BDC radical. Um, I have a BBC radical on one of my rifles and I don't on another one, dear rifle. Both our thirty six is UM and I like both. I seem to prefer the BDC even though I'm not shooting that far. How should I set that up? Can I can? I? Can? I can? I? Yeah, I can't. Why about who I asked the permission? Great question, Doug, But can you take it a step further, like just explain what the hell that means as opposed to like like start with what start with radical and then and then build up to ducks questions. Sure that mean that? That is? It's a very very popular radical that we sell, and it's a it's a commonly used term in the industry too. I think everybody is familiar with a you know, a radical being a set of crosshairs in a rifle scope and of course the you know, the user aims with the target on the center of the crosshairs. What a BBC is, that's it's it's called a bullet drop compensating radical, and you know. What we're trying to do is you, as you sit in a rifle at a fixed distance, say a hundred you're adjusting the center of the crosshairs to be zeroed in commonly at a hundred yards on the target. But of course that you know that bullet is it is it drives further out. It's it's constantly falling, and so with increasing distance, the user has to find a way to adjust it for more and more and more bullet drops it go if you want to shoot past that hundred yards distance. And what a what a BBC radical does is it gives you points of reference on the radical itself to compensate for that bullet drop at various distances. And to keep it simple. What what we did with that radical and and and it's this is this technique is used by other companies as well. Is you try to think in hundred yard increments, which which which a lot of shooters and hunters do. To keep it easy. We can't just put a you know, a million marks on that radical. So what we try to do is think about the rifle being zero to a hundred yards and having a mark at where a two hundred yard point of impact would be a three hundred, four hundred and a five hundred yard and for distances in between that, the shooter would just sort of hold between those marks. And so what happens those marks come below the center of the cross there, because what is that is you're shooting at increasing distances. What you're really doing with that radical is you're you're incrementally raising the muzzle of the gun. If you think about it, marks are lower. So you bring the rifle up to line those marks up. And it's a little tricky because what happens is you're doing one radical pattern and is any you know, anyone who's done shooting those there. You know, there are a million different cartridges, loads, bullet weights, velocities, altitudes, temperatures, pressures, all those things affect bullet drop. And so when we give you a radical and it has these five little marks on it, you have to keep in mind that those are those are drawn up and designed around h You know, we just crunched a lot of numbers. We looked at it most of the popular center fire hunting cartridges. You know, picked an altitude and a pressure and a temperature and and came up with drop numbers that we felt could match the widest possible selection and your user the manual, the user manual that comes with it gives you kind of a way to understand. It gives you an overview of that talks about different uh do even list like like like I can't remember how you guys articulated, but kind of like muzzleoaders. Yes, it does. It will break firearms into different classes. You know, say a standard hunting rifle, a magnum hunting rifle, as you point out, maybe muzzleloaders, maybe rim fires, because those those different groups all have have very different bullet drop rates. And then within each of those groups, of course, you know what, they're even finer rates um there are. There's one of the things that's really key about that, and I'll mention quickly, and it is very widely misunderstood, is that, for the most part, in in rifle scopes that are commonly sold for hunting and BBC radicals are they are a hunting device. That is Yeah, it's not a it's not a high precision, tactical or target style radical. It is a big game hunting radical. That's the purpose of that. They're they're commonly put in the style of rifle scope that that demands that there's only one power that they function at, and this is this is glad. But let me stop you because you're you're gonna enter into first vocal plane, correct second vocal point, and I want to do that, but let me I wanted to like set this up a little better. Let's just jump Let's just jump into that before before we do the first vocal plane, second focal plant. I want to say about the BBC thing. What I understand on a user manual for your scopes that has BBC radical, The manual doesn't written most of the manual doesn't say that those if you're on the manual doesn't say when you're on max power, it's one for m o A one five to five, seven and a half and eleven. Okay, why does the manual? Is that not a good I would think that may it may list that in there, but it's on your website. I was wondering if you guys don't if that's not a good way to think about it for something, it probably isn't. Because if you're if you're gonna, if you're gonna take a BBC radical and you're you're going to adopt it and use it. If you if you start thinking in those minutes of angle, you're you're sort of you're transitioning into the style of shooting that would not typically use a BBC. And and this is you know this. It's a little complex. But for example, someone who would shoot with m O A numbers or if it was a Mill scope, they would be m I gotta stop you one more time. But I hate to do this by I just want to bring m A is. Imagine you're standing in a circle earth a minute of angle. God, I hate trying to explain this. It's one six one degree if you imagine that you're standing on a flat line. No, Paul, explain this, Mark, explain this. I think the easiest way I found it explain this is is people should they're they're Basically there are two formats that are used for for adjusting turrets in the scope or using radicals, and so that's either minutes of angle or Miller radians and basically there too. If I think that, one way that's always helped me to explain is think about sort of a clock face. What we're talking about is angles in that clock face. And the reason angles are important is because if you think about what we're what we're doing with that rifle when we're trying to adjust for long range, is we're working with angles were you know, we touched on it earlier about how those marks on the radical dropped down and we bring the muzzle of the rifle up. So think of it, you know, picture maybe like an artillery gun. You know, we're to to shoot further distances. We're increasing the angle of that muzzle. Really by dialing the scope or using turrets, we're bringing it up at an angle. And so what those minutes of angle or those mill ratings are doing, they're representing that angle that we adjust and they're just two different scales of doing it. They're just simply two different ways of calculating angles. But let me throw this out you what if you'll talk about if you hear a term sub m a accuracy, Yeah, what that would mean is that the rifle is going to shoot a less than one inch group at So if you imagine this angle we're talking about one degree, it grows as it gets farther away. At one yards, the distance between the lines and that angle is one inch. At two hundred yards, it doubles. It doubles at four yards on out. So if you have m o A accuracy, mean you can shoot a one inch group at one hundred yards, you're shooting a two inch group of two hundred yards, three inch group of three yards, a four inch group of four hundred yards as you get farther out. So that's if people were talking about when they say like sub m o A accuracy in this measurement, which is like cryptic plays into all the stuff. So now I'm gonna stop talking and let you run with and let you run with what you were getting into. Yeah, what what? What? What? I was going to touch on there quickly. We were just talking about those those angles, and those angles relate to the to the marks and the radical. Remember we were going, why would you go from the hundred yard two hundred yard, three hundred yard four hundred to the one and a half four and a half, seven and a half and eleven. And the reason I was saying, the guy that buys that BBC Radical, what he's looking for is a quick and s away to compensate for long range shooting. It's easy, it's fast. Everyone can wrap their head around. I'm zero to my crossairs are onto the hundred. That next market is two d next is three. It's very it's easy to do. If I tell you now that you know on that let's say, on that five yard shot you need ten minutes of angle, you've just made the whole thing a lot more complex to that guy. You know, Now he's got to think, well, what you know? You see now you go back to the Matthew we're saying, and you think, you know, so how much drop is that that works? And that's that's commonly the techniques that are used by by precision shooters. Snipers for example, would use that style. You can use ballistics calculators that will take some basic inputs about a bullets BC and it's muzzle velocity and the and the temperature and altitude that you're at, and they will very very accurately calculate the bullet drop. And then that same program take that bullet drop and it can it can put it it can you know, express it in minutes of angle if you'd like, it can express it in the mill ratings. We're talking one of those programs called Shooter. That's one of the best ones, mainly just to get an understanding of the stuff. But with with the BBC like I do what you say, not not that we say not to do. But I in my biny harness, like I can't write a knockers in my binarts. There's this little pocket. And what I'll do with my rifle in the in the lower tim shooting, I'll draw a picture. That's that's a very good way to do that. I draw a little picture of what my BBC cross the radical looks like. And I just saw I have for a memory, guy, I take the m O a thing and I got my zero, so I do two yards zero usually, and then I have each hash mark what it is exactly, what the top of the post is on the bottom exactly. And then I put and I write down exactly what the half marks are, so my little car will have a thing. And I also put into one yards in case you want up like shooting at a kyle or something, I'll put like the one yards, so the one hundred yard. I know I'm a little bit high, you know. Then I have the two zero line, and then I have a mark for between that it might be that the two zero line and the next hash mark halfway between might be like two thirty. The next line might be down the line and there's enough numbers on there for me that if I was a look through my range finder and no, I'm gonna look down and feel very confident, right, you know what, I have many of those numbers in there, just sort of. I also know in my head. I know in my head the hash marks. But if I ever like feel like just just for sense of security, or if I'm in a situation, I know that I can pull that thing out and I got like, oh two D seventy three ten, and I'm never like going I'm never aiming between those any more than just splitting them in the middle. But I have an array of things where like any animal, did I have any business shooting at, I'm gonna know exactly where holding without taking the cap off and start clicking on the skull. That's right, you know when the advantage to that, to using that radical is that's quick and it's fast. The guys that will sit there and use those ballistics programs we talked about and calculate those drops and minutes of angle. The downfall of that is kind of this slow deliberate process. You you have to, you know, first range an object. Then you have to enter that range into that ballistics calculator. It has to then give you that correction. Then you have to either reference that correction on the radical or reach up and dial it on a turret. So it's slow, and that's that's the The big advantage to BBC radicals is speed when when you boil it down, they're fast and they're easy to use. The disadvantages they're not as accurate as calculating those minutes of angle or mill radians out And what you probably do is, you know, we touched on the fact that a BBC radical is is calculated sort of, you know, it's it's putting a whole bunch of cartridges together and blending them and coming up with a set of numbers that gives you a really general ballistics curve that's going to be common, you know for what the most big game calibers. Yeah, and perfectly and perfectly suitable for the vast majority videos and the guys that want higher accuracy out of that what they can do on our on our website, there's a there's a ballistics program called the l RBC and that'll pull up. You have to enter some basic information in about the bullet BC and the velocity and environmental conditions. But you can go to a tab on there that says radicals and you can do just what you described. You can pull up a graphic of that BBC radical And the slick thing about that program is it will take the specific data that you put in there about the load and the bullet you're shooting, and it will do the math for you and it will show rather than that simple two D four hundred five hundred, it'll do the math and it might display it'll, it'll and those numbers are exact, so you can sort of take that to the bank. Those those are much more tightly tuned. When you do that technique, it's just, you know, it's it's something everybody can do that. It's easy to use, you know, it's it's out there. I was just gonna say it's good. You can say you can take it to the bank. But I feel like verification at the range has to be done. Always want to do that. I was shooting with these market ball I feel like, you know what you gotta shoot. Yeah, too many people plug those numbers in like I'm going hunting. No, you should plug those numbers in and go to the range. Get some gongs out there, stuff and check. Because it happens to me almost every time I go. I'm like, all right, I know, like a little calculator it says four and a half minutes up right, I shoot that talker three times in a row and I miss it. All right, there's a reason. There's a reason for that. You know. What's interesting is those programs have gotten very good now. They're much better than they were, say four or even five years ago. I mean, they've really improved. The things that change that people don't understand is even if you take a chronograph and you measure the speed of the bullet coming out of your rifle, and your chronograph says feet per second, you could take five other chronographs that same day and line them up and get a spread of different velocities. They typically are not very consistent, and so that has a drastic effect on those curves. And so when you pick a number, maybe you got it off the box of ammunition, or maybe you have your chronograph and you measured it and you throw that into that program, it may or may not be accurate. It may not really be telling you the true story. And the other the other key piece of information there is the ballistics coal efficient of the bullet, the BC. And so a program is going to ask you for one BC number and for for your listeners, you know BC number, that's sort of a way it predicts how efficiently a bullet flies through the air. And and basically long skinny bullets with pointed noses and pointed tails are you know, they fly the best. They'll stay stable, and they stay stable at lower velocities right right there, and they maintain their velocity better. So if you took a long, skinny boat tailed bullet, maybe exactly the same grain weight, you know, let's say it's a hundred and sixty grain bullet, and you contrasted that with a rounded nose bullet with a flat base on it, if you went out at five yards and measured the velocity that long skinny pointed bullet, even though with the same powder charge behind them and the same muzzle blossie, it would be traveling faster at that. So that's a key thing. And the thing about bcs. Quickly I was going to touch on the program just ask you to put in one BC number. But the thing about BCS is they constantly change that that BC varies from the incident leaves the muzzle the gun so as that bullet slows the BC number. Actually, so it's you know, while the programs use a single number, it's not. It's not really what goes on, all right, I got I want to jump in and interject. I want to back up a little bit in comment on something. We're talking about, the thing I carry in my pocket or the thing I can remember by no pouch. I want to give you like a real world situation of how I how I think about this. We were running Cou's Deer in Arizona this year and at one point in time, like some deer stepped out, A bunch of does stepped out. It remembers, okay, no buck, but some does stepped out. Absolutely I would have. And it was a trail. It was like a little trail through an opening. Yeah, it's just a picture. You're looking at the hillside and there's a big brushy bottom and the first thing you see is the open hillside with a trail across it. I hadn't noticed the trail to I see some deer walking down it. Totally I could have thrown up and taken the shot. Right, there's no buck. Then the deer walk away, and I'm like, man, a buck could totally just come walking down that trail. At which point, even though I would have taken the shot, I pulled out my little thing took a distance reading on those doughs. And they're like, so if he shows up on one of the three days that I'm gonna be sitting here watching this Hilson, what exactly is going on? And I look, I'm like, oh, yeah, that shot is dial because I actually know now now it's beyond like me being like, yeah, it's probably right, ACCOUSI is not a tall animal. No, No, we're talking about hundred pound white tails. So I remember looking at that thing and being like, man, if a buck comes down that trail, I know, like what I'm gonna do. I don't know what I'm gonna do, and I could have done it anyway, but you know what I mean, it's like in that way, I use that thing. No another thing I want to strow. We're talking about this long like long distance stuff, and long distance shooting is controversial, it's not. It's not controversial to shoot long distances at a range. There's a big debate right now. I was like, what's too far? I say it's too far when you wonder about whether you're gonna hit it or not, if you're you know, whether whether you're gonna make a good head. Yeah, the minute you take a shot where you're like, I wonder if I can hit that, you are definitely shooting too far. But I my philosophy on this stuff is I take I like to take long range technology, long range skill sets, and apply it in a hunting situation to normal hunting situations. Where first time I went antelope un my brother's shot antalopen three, our response was, Wow, he hit it right. Nowadays it would be I'll say exactly why I'm hit that antelope in a lot of conditions would be a chip shot. So long distance shooting for me, in a real world hunting situation is taking shots like making it be there where you know you're like, I'm gonna shoot his heart out. Push that distance. Maybe it's a hundred yards mute. If you got into the long range, if you got into all this thinking and the proper equipment and the proper practice, you might get you. I was talking a guy there day who teaches you guys introduced me to him. The guy that teaches the Marine Corps. Yeah, he hunts a lot of He shoots a lot of doughs on some farm land. And he says, at two yards, I shoot him in the head. I'm like, I can't. I would never do that. But I'm like, he knows at fifty like me shooting a deer at fifty yards, I probably have the degree of certainty that he has a two hundred yards. Right. This guy teaches shooting and shoots and he understands that stuff in and out. So for me to say, like, what's too long for Tony to shoot? Well, for his job, he shoots eight hundred yards, right, I would if you put a target at eight and a targeted too and tolds to hit the bull's eye, I would be like, you gave me the two hundred yards and him the eight hundred yard. I'd be like, I bet this dude's gonna win the bat? Right, what's too far? You tell me that? That's definitely one of those topics. You could spend a whole another hour, and every editor, every editor at every hunting magazine, has taken his shot at saying it. But it's unsolvable. It's just like I been trying to find a way to solve it, and it'd be like when you have questioned about where you will hit, it's too far. And for a lot of guys, I'm telling you it's unfortunate to say a lot of guys, hundred yards is too far. It is you don't know what you're doing. The first time I ever hunt of Wisconsin, I shot a deer in the tember has ninety yards away, actually arranged it after I shot it. You know, the guys came back and they're like, wow, man, that is a fantastic shot. You know, and I'm from I wasn't. I'm no expert, Marchman. You have pretty solid understanding of the things that we're talking about right now, right, but it was just interesting for me to hear from them like that. Seemed like, you know, pretty long shot. And I guess, you know, for the circumstances in the Timber, I guess that is a someone long shot for sure. But if you've ever spined deer at a hundred fifty yards, I might say, man, you know what, you're shooting too far right, because you're a long If you spined a deer at that distance, you might as well you could have if that bullet was the other direction, just blue his kneecap off. You're that far off, And I think, and I think you always they spy like, yeah, went down. You see hunting shows all times, so dude, spines deer just both they're jumping up in high five and I'm like, dude, you have just chopped You're you're that many inches off. You shot too far, dude. It's all relative to you know, every everybody's different. The level equipment now is definitely better than it was before. But you know, you make a good example, Steve. They're they're probably been as many deer wounded at a hundred yards as there have been. I have seen it all times. I think I think your definition of that's probably the best I've heard. I mean, it's gonna depend on the individual, their experience, their equipment, their understanding of that equipment, all those varials, variables come into play as to how effective marksman that person is going to be. And and you can't apply a general definition across the board everybody because everybody's looking for that number. Yeah, there are some numbers here. There are some numbers I hear. I don't want to get into it. There's some numbers I here, I'm like, yeah, that's too far. Yeah, and you see you see it. I mean, you see that out on the internet when that's happening. What I'm thinking of is you it gets there's a certain distance in a certain kind of country where you just don't know what the wind is doing over there. And also it takes the bullet a long time to get there. And when you're looking at a deer and it's let's say you're looking at it elk and he's traveling up a hillside, he's he's a bull. He's got a bunch of spoot cows strung out in front of him. Right, he pauses, looks back. That deer could be into his That elk could be into his second step should he leave, should he start walking at that moment, he could be into his second step by the time your bulle gets over there. If you're talking about thousand yard shot, yeah, yeah, And you know, I you know, I hate teaven throw numbers out there, but that you know, that range is is just that's a non starter for hunting. That's just too far. It's just because there's a lot of a lapse time, you know. All right, let's hammer through some more stuff. Well, I got a quick question, well two part question. One. We noticed I was talking to Marks. I was trying to get a new scope, and I was looking for a forty millimeter bell. That's what I was like, Man, I don't really have a lot of those. Everybody wants to fill fifty millimeters, and so I'd like to know why that is and if there's like this perceived um benefit and what is the actual benefit you know, to someone's eye or you know, the hunting conditions, and what's the drawback? And then the drawback? And then two is um A big question we get in all the time is like how much money should I spend on the scope to put on my rifle? Sometimes you hear, you know, double the amount that you've got into the rifle for your optics, you know. And for most of us hunters, I think probably nine plus percent, including myself, rarely shooting past three yards. So what level of scope and how much money do I need to spend to like always be happy out to that you know distance? You know, if I'm never going past it, you know what I mean? For like the Wisconsin deer hunter. Right before you answer that, though, let's just take a quick break here from our sponsors. So yeah, so uh in response to your seven part question, there was a lot of dude, you're asking like what objective lens? Bells objective? Like what objective lens do I want? What are the pros and cons of a forty and a fifty and the thirty, and what's too much to spend on the scope. Let's let's let's do all the damn questions. We'll get through as many as we can. So and so objective diameter, right, like i'd say, in general, Paul, just to explain what that is. So that's that's the diameter of the end of the rifle scopes lens that you're not looking through, so not the ocular. So that's the I never commared ocular. Ocular is what your eyes up against exactly, and that holds true boculars right, same terms ocular objective, And you're just expressed in millimeters. So when when when you're saying forty and fifty, that's just simply the diameter of that in millimeters. It's you know, it's how big is that lens as you look at it? Exactly? So so in general, right, you know, a larger objective is going to you know, essentially bring in more light. Right, so you're gonna have better light transmission. Some whe people talk about rifle scopes. You know, light transmission is a really big deal because you know, game is oftentimes most active at donna, dusk and in the low lights scenarios. Right, Yeah, with a good scope or good binoculars, it's when you look through it, it's lighter than what your eyes giving you. Right, you can look at the hillside that's too dark and you look through binoculis be like, ohly should just do you stand over there? Right? Because it's giving it's giving you light. So and I'm not I'm not an optical engineer, right, but so there's a lot of a lot of factors, right, you know, the glass quality, uh you know is fully multi coded. You know, the quality of those uh those multi coodings. Um. The optical design you know, I talked to you know, our optical engineers at the office, you know, and uh, you know, I mean really optical design is really as much and art as it is the shape just everything and the layout number of every system. So I mean that that is you know, but that is one one variable that does affect you know, light transmissions. So um, I think you know, oftentimes people you know, bigger is better, you know, a little bit bigger is better mentality, you know, whether it comes objective diameter or or you know, larger calibers, right, you know, but I mean it is it is hamburgers, other stuff we have, you know, Yeah, we don't really exercise good portion control in this country. Maybe downsize our hamburgers. Give Mark a quick hand with that though. One one thing that's really important to understand is it's it is not always an advantage to have a bigger bell. It may give you a brighter image, it may not it is guaranteed that it's going to make the scopes it higher. Off. Here's here's the trick. One of the things to remember when when you sort of calculating brightness through an optic one of the most simplestic basic forms of estimating brightness is to divide the magnification into the objective lens, and that gives you a number called an exit pupil. And let's say you had a rifle scope. Let's say it's a variable scope. You have a turn to five X. And let's just say you have a fifty millimeter bell out there. If you divide that very simply, you get an exit pupil of ten millimeters. I think every Yeah, that's pretty easy, everybody can do that. Here's the thing to remember, though, the ultimate limiting factor in all this is the pupil of your eye. So that light has to come through the scope and before it gets to your where you're you know, the the optic nerve and your brain interprets it. It has to go through the pupil of your eye. Even when you're young, in your eyes at their maximum flexibility, you're going to get at best maybe seven millimeters. So any an exit pupil that goes beyond seven millimeters, it goes beyond the perimeter of your pupil. It's it's unusable. So here's the thing that's fifty millimeter bell that that example I just gave you. We came up with a ten millimeter exit pupil. Well, your I cannot it can't use tensi than you need. So you's the thing. You've achieved the maximum though, right, you don't have to worry about the equipment. You've achieved the maximum, But you've spent a little more for the skull. You have a heavier sculle, and it's a taller scope, so it sits higher off the rifle. Your head placement may not be as nice as it was with that forty millimeter bell, which hits lower on the rifle. Now the fifty does where you have to follow that though, you have to kind of follow that rabbit trail of that. The fifty comes up with an edge at the upper end of the magnification range. So as you get say eight, ten, twelve, sixteen next, now that fifty comes into play and makes a difference out there. So you have to think about the size of that lens in relation to the magnification that you want to run. And that's the reason. You can look at a little one to four variable that you know from one power to four power, and that's it doesn't go any higher than that. And they're typically matched up with a twenty four millimeter lens. It's about an inch in diameter. Looks small, but that that scope is just as bright as as any equally priced fifty millimeter scope at higher magnification. But you haven't gotten you haven't gotten into site picture yet though well site picture will you know that relates a lot to magnification lower lower powers typically give you a wider field. They're easier to see. Let's say you're comparing a four. You always see more every all thing, everything you don't know you're you're see. Another misconception is that that that big lens out there gives you a wider field of view, and that's that all things being equal. Yeah, same manification saying you're saying you can't always see more out the fifty. Now, many many times you may not see any difference whatsoever between the two of them. If it's a bright day, the image could look absolutely identical between the forty. And I mean if I had my body run out of the field and I directed, I'm looking through my scope, and I'm like, he's gonna shoot a scored a spray paint on one edge and then shoot a scored a spray paint the edge of the other edge of my view, and I do the same thing with a forty. He's gonna the spray paint is gonna lie with edge. It might. That has nothing to do with the objective I want to try. You want to try a neat tricks to you, I'd like take a fifty millimeter scope out or any scope and and restrict three quarters that objective lens cover it, put a cover on, you could put a little pinhole through it. On a bright day, field of view is exactly the same change. Yeah, it's it's a great way to illustrate. It's pretty neat. And actually, on a bright sunny day, if you were to restrict that lens and allow less light to come through, you see, the image quality would look better. Actually, it would get contrasting more defined. A lot of bent trest guys that do that sort of thing, they actually will restrict the aperture of their scopes on a bright day for those reasons. All right, So why is it? Though? I know, I think I was talking to the mark like, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about what people want, right, people want fifties? They do? Are they just wrong? Many times they don't get the whole picture, you know, the things we're talking about here, The fact that doesn't automatically mean it's brighter. It doesn't automatically have anything to do with field of view. You know, everybody wants a wide field of view and everybody wants a brighter image, but the fifty doesn't always get you that. And so what does what does it get you? So what he is what he gets you? Though? Think about back that exit puple discussion, and let's say we've got a four to sixteen scoll, very popular size for us. We a lot of them. It's like, in my mind is the perfect Yeah, it longer ranges. That's that scope is gonna be turned up to sixteen X and use so you know you do that mass now and now even at sixteen X, you're you're underneath that seven. Your eye is gonna use every bit of light that can because dividing fifty five exactly. So now you're the point where, yeah, that fifties doing something for you. It's it's making a noticeably brighter image that here's a question to make smoke comm oud of you, guys, ears or something people always ask. I mean often we'll say, like I predominantly hunt white tails. I'm gonna I'm gonna turn it into a specific but it's it's just like I'm averaging a ton of questions together. I live in Missouri, I generally hunt white tails. Every other year we go out to hunt elk in Colorado. Someday I'd like to go on a doll sheet hunt. I can't side what scope to buy. They have to you have to get phone calls like this, and that's and that's when I sell that person multiple rifle scopes. So yeah, so let let's deify the question. I mostly hunt white tails. Occasionally I'll do a Western big hunt, big game hunt. I can't be throwing tons of money at this stuff. I want to buy a scope. I want to get five, six, ten years out of it. What scope do I want? Well, that's a tricky one. I mean, that's that's tell him what scope you want. I could probably actually pick one from me out of our lineup that that for me would be the best fit. Can I guess first? Can I guess? Then you're honest guest. Then you guys tell us what you think. Okay, we'll critique. Oh you don't want to pick an actual model? No? No, no. If you want picking a magnification range, okay, no manification range, objective lens, oh, all around whitetail okay, hunts white till every year, Yeah they do. Okay. He goes out to Colorado. Oh, three D nine by forty okay, yeah, me too, probably four, just because I don't know why. So I'll give you I'll give you mine, and I concur with the four to six team by fifty because to me, I find it to be like an incredibly versatile magnification range. And I always, I always I like magnification, right, so I'll edge towards the skill that has higher manifications. So but to me, that scope is like, it's awesome for the tree stand in the timber. You know, you can crank it down to four and then you can also you know, engage you know, targets or animals at extended ranges as well. I've shot the four to sixteen to a thousand yards and shot deer out of a tree stand with that same right. That's why I like the three nights kind of the same thing. But when I'm walking around, I don't care where I'm walking around. I could be walking around out in eastern Montana on the flattest ground in the world. I carry my scope on four because if you jump something up, I never wish in a in a practical honey experience, I'm talking like a deer stands up in thick ass brush twenty five yards away. I've never had on four power. I can find that thing. But I've raised enough rifles to my face where I don't do the like look for it. Like when I'm looking at something, my eye stays on it, my scope comes to my eye. My eye doesn't go to my scope. My scope comes to my eye, and that thing is right there in the center of the scope. I've never been I've never lost an animal or I would have gotten him with the one power scope, Like it's all I always can find. I can find running stuff in the four power scope. But when I'm sitting there and I see, like, holy sh it, there's like a deer laying over there. You know what's going on? Kresniki shotting there? Turn up to sixteen man. You see like his eyelashes and stuff. You know. It's just like I love having it there. I'm always looking at stuff do there? Yeah, Yeah, I mean I would agree with Mark. That's a really good effective zoom range. You can kind of do anything with it. I have a you know, I I spend a lot of time hunting in the mountains. I have a tendency to like lighter weight scope, so I would my personal choice would be to give up a little bit of that light gathering and go to a slightly smaller objective forty or forty two. Maybe, Um, you're gonna lose a little bit of weight. Um, you have that advantage that touched on earlier. Typically the smaller objective means the rifle can the scope can sit a little bit lower on the rifle, and that can aid you better head placement on the stock. You you you you probably will shoot a little more accurately with that. It's a pretty fine distinction though. You know, that's almost my my sort of personal lean as opposed to someone else's. Um, there's not you know, it's one of those things. Are definitely not a black or white right or wrong answer to that type of thing. You know, I'm willing to trade off this and gain that so much exactly. I mean, like I hunt the mountains a lot, and I'll I'll suck it up and take that that weight penalty because to me, like the magnification is like outweighs that advantage for myself. But you know a lot of stuff like Paul's is, like we're talking about that just comes down to personal preference. You know, I'm not as weight like, I'm not as weight obsessed some people are. Because I find that you can sit around talking all day. This is a little bit of a digression from from optics. Do you sit around talking all day like how many ounces you save by the scopeboard asco dude, you want to talk about save an ounces? Do you bring a tent or not bring a tent? Now we're talking about now we're talking about six Yeah, we're talking about six pounds now. So it's like I generally like, I don't you know like guys who are like cutting their toothbrush handle and half and stuff. I mean, you gotta get you have to have your kids so dialed at the point where you're where you're realizing that you're getting more miles every day because you ran that forty millimeter not the fifty millimeter scope. Like you have to be a very detail oriented backpack hunter with a ton of packing experience where that is the issue. There are some pieces of equipment when you think about when you're on a hunt. Let's say you're on an extended you know, eight ten day hunt. Did you carry every day all the time with you and there you know the rifles one of them that that you know, the tent set up. You're not packing that ten around everything. You're not packing so there are pieces of gear where shaving weight off is more valuable than others. In that sense, rifle you're gonna have with you all the time. I did a lot of hunting with a rifle that I was shocked one day when I put it on a digital scale and the rifle scope combo was twelve pounds nine ounces. I had totaled it all over. And then I got a rifle where the rifle scope combo came into eight and a half. It felt like I was carrying a chopstick. But you know, you know that that's leaving a tent or not. The flip side, too, is that a lot of times those heavy rifles are easier to shoot. Like so there's all there's there's so many different angles. My brother shoots a big like I actually gave it to him. Um, he shoots a big what's the what's the main ruger rifles like seventies things like it's a three d win big old thick barrel heavy stock. He carries the thing ever, because because you know what, when I laid that thing over my backpack, I looked at the scold like this thing is gonna die because it's like it just it's like it's like thump, you know, that rifle lays down there and you're not. He's like, I just settled and I'm like, yeah, I'll tear that bullets gone. And then light rifles you just never get that feeling I've had. I had a rifle that we're getting wet. This is the whole subject. I had a rifle, I decided it was too light, had a different barrel put on it, just because not nothing with accuracy. I had a different barrel put because I just couldn't stand how light it was. It never felt settled in. But let's jump the knockers, because there's not a whole lot to discus us on knockers. With numbers, people are always like ten, like the most obvious one, eight power, ten power or whatever. What's your spiel what's what? What? What's the vortex spiel Ford? Well, those are you know, those are the those are the two most popular magnifications sold eight and tenant And you know, for that simply refers to how many times that binocular is magnifying with your I S S. So in one instance something is eight times bigger, in the other instance it's ten times bigger. Not a big difference. You know, I think it's there. You want to think of the terrain in the country that you're using it in and and typically Western hunters definitely gravitate towards ten powered binos. You have a little extra edge, a little more magnification. You're using them at greater distances typically, and so that ability to magnify something a little bit larger is of benefit. The drawbacks to it are is the field of view, the image that we talked about that you were talking about earlier with the rifle scope. Typically in the tent X, if everything else is equal, it's going to be narrower. You're gonna look at a smaller image when you're looking at something. So the guy with the spray paint cans, the guy with the spray paint cans, he's only going to see three quarters of what he could see in the eight power by now. And the other thing is that when you're trying to hold that binocular, what you're doing, you know, you're just picking up in your hands and holding it. The higher the magnification is, the harder is to hold that thing steady. It's gonna wiggle in your hands. And if you carry that to an extreme and you looked at a twelve or fifteen power binocular and you try to hand hold it, that image is gonna be wiggly and shaky, and so you lose some of the benefit of having that magnification ten x is it's to the point most people can hold him pretty steady, comfortably. I disagree on this one thing. I have a very firm opinion on about this. I find that I used to not be able to freehand tense. Yeah, I know where you're going. I learned. I learned to freehand tense. Yeah, sure, I don't think. I really don't think anyone can freehand a pair of twelve powers with all the game. Well you can, but it's just free. There's gonna be a loss. There's gonna be lost. And obviously, you know you're a big fan of tripod use. We certainly are too. I grew up doing that as well, using any of these baculars on a tripod. Taking your hands out of the equation, huge difference, giganic difference. Obviously, can realize that, yeah, you put the things on a tripod, like a pair of tens a tripod, like powers on a tripod, they're fast proved more effective once I started tripod glassing, Like, now I don't like it if I'm not Tripod's annoying. Yeah, it realized all the stuff you're missing. Like when I when I had cous here for the first time, that's when I was like really introduced to you know, hardcore tripod glassing, like really tearing the country side apart. And that's actually like affected all my other hunting, Like I apply that to all my western hunting. Yeah, because you're like, oh, hey, there's a quail a mile away over there, but just aw run between two bushes. You've never seen that thing, you know. But back to the eight tending, I will often say, and I'm gonna let you have the last word of this. I'll often tell people, if I had to really be super general, if you hunt like the east east of the Big Bend in the Missouri, I'd be like, eight. Yeah, good advice that the and the and the guy with the eight he's not gonna go wrong if he takes that eight power out west and hunts it's it's gonna work. Just funny. I wouldn't, Yeah, you wouldn't. Yeah, I know we're on the same page on that. But talk about twelves, fifteens, all the craziest. So what happens is, you know, will agree to disagree on tense. I think that's the that is definitely. Do you think anyone can free hand a pair of tense not? Not to the same level of effectiveness. No, definitely not. You know, I wouldn't say anybody can pick up a pair of tens and they're gonna be effective with it. You really have to, you know, as you point out, sort of learn the tricks. You're gonna you know, you're gonna tuck your elbows, you're gonna brace your hands, you're gonna hold on your hat. You find ways to help stabilize that by no or that. What do you call when you can screw the eye cups in and out? Well, that that would be something you would set whether you were eyeglasses or not. But I find I used to dial them all the way in and then put my finger for stability, that I put my finger on my eyebrow and bring the cup to my finger. It would get a lot of stability like that. Now I find that I screw them all the way out, and I just kind of have a sweet spot where screwed all the way out. I just know where they're supposed to be in my eye socket, and it's just like shooting a bow where you have the same anchor point. When I bring my bandacres up, like I know how that I cut feels and I get great. I would definitely you know that that is absolutely one of those tricks. You know when I when I talk about using tents, you you they have to touch your face if you're just holding them out in space and they're off of your face and floating there. Yeah, I mean I agree with you completely. They are you know, very hard to use. You have to brace, they have to touch your face. You know, I tended I have more deep set eyes. I tended. I mean, driving pretty hard on my my eyebrow ridge. But that's all you know, that's what's helping stabilize them and make him steady. You know when you let like a picture that you're trying to look into a window with your hands where you make that little like, yeah, you kind of like you find ways of doing that that gives you law stability with your right and that you know, having your hands up there too. You know you're blacking that sidelight, that lateral light from coming in on him. But once you go beyond tend, you know, it's pretty much it's black and white. At that point, you're you're into the zone. Now that that really you're going to get the most benefit by using a tripod. Ryan Callahan three hands, and I've done honestly, I talk bad about him behind his back. Yeah, I've done it too, because we're like, there's no way he's pretty as he sat down behind him on a on a tripod and he's done. He's done. He's like an eyed he's done a ton of hunt. In our defense, we knew it behind his back. We also do it to his face. I'll be like, dude, you can't honestly tell me that you're free hand. He likes to set up with a tripod. His deal is this, likes to look through a tripod on a mountain hunt, backpack hunt. He doesn't want to carry too loves doing. He spends most of his time tripod knocking. So yeah, if he's walking up the trail and something catches his eye, short quick clip, he'll have a short quick look. I ran the same pros and cons, and I'm like, I value that. What is that quick look? To the point where I'm I'm willing to suffer behind the tripod in order to have like a more stable quick look. Yeah you're well, you're you know, you're definitely gonna get more detailed doing that. Absolutely, you know, he he may be able to quickly ide an animal, but yeah, you know it's he's not going to see the level of detail that he will do. He's like, he's like that bears eight and a half, not eight. Before I started really picking apart the hillside cous deer hunting and elk hunting in Arizona, I learned these binoculars in Colorado from the my the senior guys that I worked with, and their whole thing was, as we're still hunting through quaky patches or the edge of quakies and timber looking for elk they were coming out to feed, They're just like, always just bring up your binoculars. Being up your binoculars, you can only see eight yards with your eyes, a hundred yards of your eyes. As soon as you bring up those binoculars, you just X rayed another thirty yards. And that's where those eight intense. I feel like, just really that's what we hadn't gotten. You could be still hunting for snowshoe hairs. I feel do even like that's a whole It's great you bring it up because that's like a who older kind of but not like all this tripod talk and all that, not being like, oh, can I extend my vision? It'd be like, what's fifty yards away? Binoculars have great Like you ask any burder people who will look at birds, They're like, they're like, no, I'm talking about what's I'm looking at a bird ten yards away? Man, But I want to know is it you know, does you have like a slight yellow crown? You know, So that's the whole other aspect of of using binoculars is like finding deer in the brush, right that they're laying right in hiding in plain slight right. Yeah, And that's you know, that's the reason that you know, people will end up with different sizes of binos. And you know, going back to the rifle scopes, you know that we sell guys four or five six different rifle scopes because at the point that you can afford to do that kind of thing, of course, you can, you know, you can key on specialties doing it. So when a guy's saying like when a guy's kicking around, he's like, I'm gonna buy eight. So let's say eight by thirty two. How does it usually go like? There's usually like a round thirty, some variability around forty around fifty objective lens. Yeah, that's pretty common. And when you hear when someone says eight by forty eight by are, what they're talking about is eight power fifty millimeter objective lens, right, just the same way the rifle scopes were on that. If you're weighing between forty and fifty objective lens, is it fair to say you're just asking yourself a weight, a weight and clunkiness versus image quality or is it more complicated than that. It's maybe a little more complicated than that. You know you can you can use those same exit pupil numbers we talked about earlier, dividing magnification into objective lens size to get kind of a crude way of estimating brightness. And typically the binos are all they're not going to go much beyond that that's seven millimeter range, so they're typically they're all going to give you a workable range where there's concrete benefit from going from that thirty two to the forty, to the forty two to the fifty. But for each user you have to you know, you have to decide on that because as that lens goes from thirty to forty to fifty, you can envision that the size and the weight of that binocular go up correspondingly. So while you do, you know, you do increase the low light performance by doing that, you you know, you're carrying packing around a larger, heavier binocular, typically a longer binocular when you go to those bigger objective lenses. So there's always a there's a there's just a trade off in there, and and everybody comes in at a different spot. Someone who would buy a you know, a lower power binocular with a big objective lens, obviously you're buying something there that's made to really be focused on low light performance, and the tradeoff is it's probably going to be a bigger, heavier binocular. You know, that's not all that practical during daytime use. So it's you know, it's a matter of picking what matches what you're doing, you know, what what activity are you doing. I found that through the years, as I've gotten more interested in glass and more interested in glassing and optics. I found that I've gone. I've tended to go in binoculars higher magnificate from eight to tens than bigger objected lens. Yeah, part of it was switching to a binol carrier. Makes a binal carrier like just around your neck. You feel those ounces in a binyl Carrier's kind of like Honestly, if I'm walking around my bino carry on and you and you, I couldn't tell you if you like secretly switched mind to a fifty, I wouldn't know. Nfi I pulled him out. It's just it's just like it's just not there. It's like the weights distributed when you're crawling. They're not like banging you in the nose, and very valuable piece of gear. You wind up getting a good carrier and you can carry a hell of a lot more binocular It just doesn't bother you. That's one other thing we should hit on really quickly, Steve, because as we've chatted through this, I keep meaning to say that. And one of the things you know, for example, in our lines of binoculars, we have four or five different tiers and you see the same size, say that ten by forty two, repeated in one series and the next, next to the next, and the next, and we get that question a lot about why is that what different ten forty two's And what's really important for people understand when we talk about brightness and exit pupils and these quick ways of calculating that the one thing that they can't take in effect or take into consideration is the quality of the piece and the user or the fellow applying those mathematical formulas. So you could you could take let's say, let's say it at tend by fifty binocular fairly common size. You do the math, you have that five millimeter exit pupil. You let's say you you took a binocular that may be retailed for a hundred dollars and contrasted that with a high end binocular to say, retailed for two thousand dollars, same exit people exactly between the two of those that five millimeter exit pupil. And so someone might say, well, that's the same number. These should be equally bright binoculars, right they you know, they both come out ahead in the same formula. But the thing about optics is the quality of glass it's used in the quality of the coatings that are applied to that glass, and how many of those codings are applied, and the the you know, the design of the optic, the layout of the lenses, how many lenses are used in there. Those are all at least as important as those simplistic numbers of calculating exit people. And that there's no way you can't you can't build that into that formula, and so that expensive to him by fifty very typically is going to drastically outperform that, you know, that less expensive model. Is it easier for you guys to answer the question what makes shitty optics shitty or what makes good optics good? I think it's easier to concentrate on the on the goods. Well get all the time, like why the hell would I spend because they look better? Yeah, it's you know, if you can what it is, Yeah, you know, building the things. If you can build something tighter and the mechanical tolerances are tighter and those lenses are more precisely held in a line, it's gonna increase optical performance. It's gonna make the piece more expensive to build. Whether it's a bocular, it could, ye, sure it could. Yeah, the quality of the glass it's used. You know, there's glasses is a simple commodity. It can it can be had in very low end for formulations that are full of chromatic aberration and distortion. It varies widely. Coatings that are applied to the glass have a huge effect and that and what codings do is they they reduce light loss to reflection. So it's light hits a lens, a certain amount of it is reflected back off that lens rather than going through it into your eye. And so any reflective coatings reduce that and they allow more the light to come through. And so the higher the quality of that coding, and by increasing the number of layers of that that are applied, you keep bumping up that that light transmission number. That's where you get that term, you know, fully multi coded opting. You see that catalogs all the time, and I feel like that's one of the things that just way over people's heads, idiots, you know what kind of you see it so often used that it just kind of blurs into the background. That's what it means. That's what it means. Loss is the idea. Yeah, um, how long we've been talking to Okay, Doug concluding thoughts questions, doing it off quiet? Well, if you just said, they're replaying that awesome turkey out this morning, it was how can that Steve Gut just talk to those turkeys? Well, it was, it was, It was incredible. But U and I certainly have a new appreciation for you, or enhanced the wider appreciation. I learned a lot about optics today. Before this discussion, I was thinking about this Charlie Brown cartoon about are you near sighted or far sighted? One of the like Lionus has classes on him and he said, well, I don't know what does that mean. And they said, well, nearsighted means that you see things close. And they're kind of explaining to him, and uh, he says, glasses make me see better. So all of this I was learning what I know about. Boil it down, that's good optics make me see better. Bam. Yeah, you're it's a leap of faith, like you're sort of know it's not a leap of faith because I had this like I had this moment in my life that I always thought about where I never had good knocultors. Okay, I've never had It's that what I say him it's not what I had tons of money laying around. I just didn't have money therefore didn't have good bnocutors. I was hunting caribou this guy, and he had it's got done guiding on the Alaska Peninsula for a year and some At the end of the guiding season, he came into a pair of good bnoctors were sitting in our caribou camp. A grizzly bears walking up the bank on the opposite of the river. I'm looking at it's like a brown blob. I throw up chuck knockers and I looked through it and I can see cow licks moving across the bear from the wind. Yeah, and I'm like, let me see that again. I had an epiphany like that too. I you know, my background is guiding. I guided for many many years in the state Idoa before doing this, and I followed the same course. I went from incrementally increasing the quality of my optics every year. And I had an epiphany. One year I was hunting with a couple of great, big, overweight to Hawaiian guys that showed up with piles of brand new gear in boxes and we sat out the evening. We came into camp. It was an elkhant climbed up on a ridge just that night to climb out and look. And I had a mid priced pair of I think it was Pentacs binoculars at time, decent, decent optics. And this guy pulls out out of his case, this this big boxy hard case, and he flips it open, and he's got a brand new pair of like As, which is very nice, high end brand of optics, and he pulls them out and we're at that point, we're looking into kind of a low setting sound, tough, tough glassing, and I'm sort of struggling to see much because I'm getting all kinds of reflections coming into my binoculars. And this, this great, big guy with zero Western hunting experience whatsoever, picks this pair of binoculars out of this box. Minutes he's picking out elk coming out of the trees, and I just I couldn't believe it. I thought he was seeing things. It just could not believe. And I had finally had to reach over and look through his binoculars and and it just it was stunning, you know, low and behold, I mean elk here and out there and out there, and that at that. I mean, I still remember that to this day. It was it really it was like me. I came out of there being like I don't care what, I don't care if I got to move into a new apartment. I'm from that point on, I saved every tip I had for two years, and I bought a pair of the exact same. Like my takeaway and I can take it from what you guys both just said. It will be my closing statement will be that to really see that both of you guys describe experiences that happened in the field in certain situations, certain light. A lot of these. A lot of people go to Dicks or the Big five and or Sportsman's and compare binoculars inside underfluorescent lights at you know, max range of whatever that is maybe sorry trying to read the end caps and they all look great, and they do not look great when you're looking into that setting sun. It makes a huge, huge difference. So yeah, well you just buy a bunch of stuff in vortex. No one, you're gonna return it all like I want one everything. A couple of days later, this massive it's except editors marked that that's at one. Go to your sporting store and be nice, seem reasonable, offer to leave your driver's license and and see if you can go out in the park and not have a look and try to do it, you know, late in today, early in the morning, Like you know, don't just look at the end cap down the road, down the but go out. See you go outside, look at it. Try to go look at a bird. Do his feathers look sharp, to the point of his beak look clear? I'll say this, and Mark Boran concluding this, Well, this is just my one concluding thought is that whether I work for an optics company or not or whatever, I what I work for Vortex. Good quality optics are unequivocally one of the most important pieces of gear. And you're hunting arsenal, dude, I I know I've had like three concluding thoughts. I absolutely agree. I absolutely I would rather if you told me you can hunt with boots and no binoculars or barefoot with binoculars, I would have a very difficult patch. I'd be like, how about I get socks, Paul, including thoughts. No, I mean, I think we've touched on a lot of great things here. I mean it's hopefully it's been abuse to some of your listeners out there, and um, oh yeah, I want to say thank you for just unbelievable job explaining some of those like millimeter bell thing. I mean, that was awesome and I enjoyed chanting about you know, we I just talked about that, that experience I had in the field, and really at that point it to me that sort of set a real interest in optics from that point out use him and I percussed in a hunting for big horn cheap, which is extremely optics intensive. You know, I've had that interest in love and that ever since. So it's I enjoyed talking about it. It's been a lot of fun. Not now I have something concrete to refer when people ask these questions, will just be like, if you have an hour and thirty minutes the internet connection, I'll be happy to answer that question for you. All right, Um yeah, go to go to hunt dot com by the teach shirts so you look cool. Um, Doug, if you land you want to manage low and Oak Interests? Is that is your company named after that oak over there? Yes it is. I'm looking at the damn oak right now. I think, yeah, lowing out, Uh, call for if you could have a guy. I want one last thing I want to touch on. If a guy has a question, he calls Vortex, someone answers the phone. This this is gonna sound awful, but someone who's like fluent in English answers the phone absolutely, and they're welcome to the same questions we've been talking about here. Anyone can call in and ask any of those questions or you know, any number of us there that are happy to help out. And if the warranty you have it's good for any optics in your line or not. Yes, absolutely, like you buy it's just something not right, it's the warranty is cool, it's it's it's yeah. It covers the original buyer and anyone else down the road that buys it. It covers anything really outside of losing it. What we're having we've seen come in with bullet hole, so we've already seen it. That's that's a true story. So but any like like I like that, like the razor stuff is great. By'm saying, if someone just can't pull that off financially, he gets a same warranty. Absolutely absolutely doesn't that that has nothing to do with it. So what's you know, so sort of losing them once you buy them. You're cool, You're covered. You are covered all right, um okay good. Thanks for joining us to take care