Zeroing your rifle, use electronic targets?

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Don’t know if anyone has watched this one yet

If you’re not interested in watching for an hour and 15 minutes here are the main points:

Wondering zero can be caused by:

  1. shooter error. Really not addressed at all in the podcast.

  2. mechanical issues like loose screws, Etc

  3. poor zeroing technique which takes up the pretty much entirety of the podcast.

In turn, poor zeroing technique is due to:

  1. Too small sample size. 15 is the bare minimum. 20 is better, 30 even more better. We’ve heard this before from them.

  2. Using your eyeballs to determine the center of your group and not a true scientific measurement of the center.

  3. Using zero range instead of zero angle. Also heard this before from them. However really don’t hear much about this from anyone other than them.

I was pondering this a bit and came to the realization that if I hung a Target at 100 yards and shot a 15 shot zero group, that unless I’m shooting a super poorly performing load, I’m going to be slinging bullets into holes made by prior bullets. This is going to be much worse with 20, 25, 30 shot groups. So when I go to my app and I start telling it where the impacts are, I’ve got to account for all the bullets that went through prior holes and that’s going to be nearly impossible to do unless it’s just pure guesswork. And if you’re just doing pure guesswork then you’re completely negating any type of true scientific measurement of a zero.

So I’m guessing they are using electronic targets or something at their facility?

I have zero experience with electronic targets. Anyone on here use them for zeroing their rifles or other things?

Also feel free to offer your opinion regarding their conclusions from the podcast overall

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Use software like ontarget to overlay multiple 5 shot groups and determine true zero. I would still zero at 100 to avoid issues with wind.

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The other thing they failed to address in the podcast is that your POI will wander as you shoot from different positions and there’s nothing you can really do about it. The effect only really starts to manifest when you’re already splitting hairs.

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How long have you been using on target? I downloaded that many months ago, probably over a year now and it’s never worked on my PC at all

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Few years; I got it running with wine under linux so afraid I can’t help you there :rofl: . I have a personal project to make an open source replacement but I need to find time to work on it more.

There’s a more annoying approach with image editing software and patience to do the same thing that Keith Glasscock did a video on a while back.

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