F T/R Competition Spotting

[pewpewfever]

I haven’t shot F class yet. I just got a Swarovski BTX 85 and used it fir the first time shooting paper at 300 yards. I had a really hard time seeing the bullet holes in the black bull, though another person was able to see them with difficulty using my spotting scope. In F class, are competitors observing poi at 600 yards and 1000 yards and adjusting their wind call from shot to shot? If so, how?

 

[memilanuk]

As a general rule, no.

Swarovski is good glass (understatement of the year)... but seeing black holes in black paper, unless the lighting is coming from just the right angle, with no mirage... ain't happening, at least not often enough to count on.

The way F-class works, you shoot, another competitor maintains your score sheet, and a third one is in a safe location behind the target berm (referred to as the 'pits' or the 'butts') and pulls the target down after each shot, puts a scoring plug in the bullet hole, moves a value disk to the appropriate location to indicate the value of the shot (helps with being able to tell from the firing line whether the shot is a 9 or a 10 if it's close to the scoring ring), and runs the target back up for you to view and shoot again. The whole process takes ~10 seconds, give or take. Everybody rotates thru taking turns at shooting, scoring and pulling targets.

More and more ranges are moving to electronic targets, which use some form of acoustic sensors to triangulate the shot location as the bullet passes thru the target - thereby eliminating the need for personnel down-range. There's a lot of arguing back and forth about the accuracy/consistency of various target systems vs. 'manual' pulling/scoring of targets... but as a match director, I see it more as a range safety thing - if I don't *have* to have people down range, I'm all for it.

 

[memilanuk]

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