5.11 Tactical Field Ops Watch - by Chris Parkin
During a recent trip shooting the 338 Lapua DTA rifle at the WMS Steel Challenge facility in Wales, Andrew Venables the owner was keen to show me a `handy` new toy he had bought to help out his clients.
Many of the shooters who come here also want to learn a little more about shooting longer ranges but have little or no experience of - or access to - ballistic data, other than PC or web-based software.
Last year, I ran a test on some iPhone app software that allowed shooters to run real-time data to produce ballistic solutions with good accuracy but eventually went on to test the ultimate Kestrel-Horus tool with full atmospheric condition and wind monitoring backup to further enhance the data produced - but at a price.
Well, the toy Andrew had was a wrist watch, a 5.11 Tactical Watch to be precise, with an inbuilt ballistic computer. Handy yes but, I am a natural sceptic and had to have a go with one myself to really decide on its merits.
As anyone with experience shooting long ranges knows, a generated number, produced by any method is not the be-all and end-all of a first round hit or converted sighter. Practice, testing and wind reading will always refine and evolve any data set but particularly for me - often testing a different rifle every month - it is terribly useful to have to do nothing more than work up a ball-park accurate load, zero and measure a velocity and, with the help of these ballistic aids, go out and start shooting at any range.
With that goal in mind I will open this story by saying that much as I love Ballistic FTE on the iPhone, for now, au revoir!
Nightgear.co.uk were kind enough to supply a 5.11 watch for testing and it arrived promptly in a recorded-delivery packet the next morning. I love new tools that just fall out of a box and you can start using immediately without studying a weighty manual and it is a true sign to me of ‘intuitive usage charactristics’ that I got straight into the 5.11.
As well as the regular digital watch functions like time, date, alarms and the more unusual digital compass,
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5.11 Tactical Field Ops Watch By Chris Parkin
the orange button on the watch transfers you into ‘rifle’ mode where you have two option screens simply controlled by three other keys acting as ‘select mode’ and then ‘up’ and ‘down’ keys.
The set-up screen allows you to enter the usual ballistic variables such as zero range, ballistic coefficient (B.C.) muzzle velocity, scope height and metric or imperial units. A limited set of atmospheric variables can be entered - such as altitude and temperature but it seems to strike a nice balance between these and more complex variables such as humidity and dew point etc. offered by some other ballistic computers.
Output results are offered in either mils or MOA and you can choose between what the instructions describe as either ‘shooters’ or ‘true’ adjustments - i.e. real minutes of angle or the more simplistic ‘inches at 100 yards’ approach.
After setting up your rifle/load combo (unfortunately you can only have one saved at a time in the memory), you return to the ‘real time’ screen where you are invited to input range, wind speed and direction etc. and, after a click of the ‘compute’ button, the correct elevation and windage readouts are displayed. Usefully, coriolis effect is also automatically compensated for.
The watch can be set to display readouts of mils or MOA as well as the option to use single ‘click’ units but I usually find counting hundreds of individual clicks a little slow and mistakes are easily made. On the other hand, a hunter without ballistic turrets may prefer this method and it is certainly the way many shooters prefer to think as mils and minutes of angle are a foreign language to them.
When entering the ‘range to target distance’, this can only be refined to the nearest 25 yards which I do find a little basic. A varmint shooter for example may be engaging a very small target at extreme range and every single yard to which you can refine your result is very important. As a target shooter with sighters on hand, ‘perfect’ is great but close is good enough - for me anyway. Other entered units can all be inputted to single figures, very important with muzzle velocity and BC.
After three months, a trip out to America and a family holiday, I finally took the watch off to wear a dress
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