Advanced Marksmanship Windage, Kestrel and Shooting OH MY!

[fewenuff]

Just wondering how and if anyone is using their Kestrel or similar tool to guesstimate the wind? It is a bit of a PIA to use wind measuring tools in many shooting scenarios for amateurs

, for professionals

not so much. I can do as good and easier job estimating the wind without the tool using the tried and true methods.

I am seeing some success when using the Kestrel to measure the wind perpendicular to the direction of the shot. Being an enginerd I love vectors (direction and magnitude). Use is as easy as holding or standing the Kestrel parallel to the direction of the shot. It gives you a fair estimate of the wind velocity component that will most affect your shot. The value will be typically only a part of the actual wind velocity but again the part that will most affect your shot.

For example: if you are shooting due North and the wind is from the North East or South East at 10 mph. Then the Eastern component of the wind would be 10*cos(45 deg) or ~7Mph (7.0710678 for the anal retentive) The North or South component would be 7Mph head or tail wind respectively.

Anyone out there using this method or tried it and can shit on the idea before I go all nerdy on it?

600-1000 yds, .308 why do you ask?

Starving beavers (range. paper. get it?) mostly though I might get the bug to hunt again.

Thx!

 

[Sterling Shooter]

Re: Windage, Kestrel and Shooting OH MY!

Wind meters can obviously come to the aid of a curious shooter. Since some shooters bet on what's going on at mid-range however, other methods for wind estimation, like reading mirage, are valued too.

 

[JFComfort]

Re: Windage, Kestrel and Shooting OH MY!

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Sterling Shooter</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Wind meters can obviously come to the aid of a curious shooter. Since some shooters bet on what's going on at mid-range however, other methods for wind estimation, like reading mirage, are valued too. </div></div>

+1, I use a Kestrel and JBM to give me a reference point then fine tune my actual data once I put rounds down range.

We don't have a whole lot of natural indicators so we utilize dust, dirt, mirage anything to aid us.

 

[LawnMM]

Re: Windage, Kestrel and Shooting OH MY!

The kestrels will give you the wind heading on a compass. If you know the angle of the wind you can get as nerdy and anal about it as you want.

If 0/360 is due north, and your kestrel tells you the wind is coming in from 20 degrees, there's your angle. Then you can get real specific with decimal values for the wind at those angles. I started doing this once...

Then I decided it was probably a lot more math and work to figure it out than it was worth. I suspect there's a reason people use full value and half value winds, maybe quarter value, but getting any finer in your adjustments than that I doubt is worth it.

Is that kinda what you're thinking? I'm trying to figure out what you're trying to do with the cosine angle math and wind speeds.

 

[EXTREMEPREJUDICE]

Re: Windage, Kestrel and Shooting OH MY!

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: fewenuff</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Anyone out there using this method or tried it and can shit on the idea before I go all nerdy on it? </div></div>

Sure, it has value when you have constants, such as an X MPH value wind from direction Y. But your earlier statement is more valuable. Reading the wind is more of an art than a science. How many velocity and direction changes happen over a 600 to 1000 meter distance? That's why most of us can't shoot 1/2 MOA at 1000 meters with a 1/2 MOA rifle. It's fun to use every tool at our disposal but in the end it's more than just math. It would be great if I could take my Kestrel, ballistics calculator, and DOPE and have a fool proof solution, but it just doesn't work for me.

 

[fewenuff]

Re: Windage, Kestrel and Shooting OH MY!

I was using the math only to show that there is a component of the wind that most affects a shot. The wind that is perpendicular to the direction of the shot. I don't want to do the math, though I can, I want to know the magnitude of that perpendicular wind. It is similar to the full value, half value etc estimation/speculation.

I do not want to spin around in circles trying to find the actual direction and magnitude of the wind. I shoot in the desert most of the time and the wind is devil-fun to figure out. Mechanical (temperature inversions, canyon flow) and "normal" wind effects are in play, lottsa swirling 180 deg switches etc. I am not touting this an end all method just a short cut that actually takes the math and or estimation out of it. This method is a short cut and has its own sources of error. "SO, you REALLY think that you are capturing the data accurately with that instrument Mr. fewenuff? It is all about knowing if your approximation is good enough..."

Orient the kestrel so you can look at it easily from your shooting position (the reading face should be parallel to the direction of the shot), cheek in place, note the velocity (that should be pushing your shoot left or right), take into account any other observed conditions, compensate and let her fly. Of course only for estimating effects of the wind at your shooting location...

Thx for the input folks. The request for input was mostly to keep me from running off to do testing that had already taken place. The idea is to use the tool simply and quickly without going nerdy AR with the darn thing. Give me a quick and easy always the same method to measure the magnitude of the velocity perpendicular to the shot. Though a nerd I like to shoot much more than I like to do math, even the stuff I can do in my head (no brag I'm just a zipper head engineer). (--8

I have enough nerdy stuff going on no need to look for more.

Again THX!