I spent a few hours shooting in the wind today, mostly shooting pellets. I didn’t shoot beyond 60 yards and I probably shot around 180-200 pellets. I cannot say that I got good results with them farther out. Now I need to figure out if it’s my tune, shooting technique, dirty barrel, etc. It was windy with changing wind gusts close to 20 mph (I think 18 mph was the fastest). I made a few good shots reading the wind. I do think I need to remove this scope. As much as I’ve tried, I just can’t say that I like this Athlon Helos BTR Gen 2. Please don’t message me asking if I want to sell it. If I do you’ll probably see an ad. I have an idea of what I want to replace it with. I did notice that when I shot slugs for my last 3-4 groups, they looked better. I really couldn’t see my targets clearly after shooting the first group. I was out at
60 65 yards towards sunset and it’s tough for me to see fine details in low light at a distance with this scope.
These groups were about as good as it got for me shooting out at 60-65 yards. The top target was from 60 yards. The bottom target was from 65 yards. On the bottom target I could hardly make out a faint white spot (the bullseye) on the target at 8x mag using my illuminated reticle. The illuminated reticle looks thick at a distance and can get in the way of a small target area. These targets are shot shooting NSA 110 grain slugs.
NSA .357, 110 grain hollow-point dish-base slugs tend to work their way loose in some of the magazine chambers after shooting a few shots. I experienced about 3-4 misfires where the gun dry fired and I had to stop shooting, put it on safe, lift the mag release lever, and manually advanced the mag to the next chamber. Here’s a photo of the base of a slug when I stopped to manually advance the mag following a misfire. Can you see how the other slugs are still seated (farther forward) in their chambers?
Another issue that I’ve been paying attention to the last three shooting sessions is that I am catching a blast of air to my shooting eye shooting this gun. Zoom in on my photos of the rifle in this thread to see where my scope placement is to provide feedback to whether or not you all think my scope is mounted in a bad location on the picatinny rail. As it currently sits, I am comfortable with the placement of my face and the eye box. Even when wearing safety glasses, the air blast blows beneath the glasses not over the lens. Suggestions are welcomed to correct this. I have somewhat of an idea of what I can try but it’s counterintuitive to the remedy of another issue I’ve experienced.
I did recover a spent pellet next to the back stop. Here’s how it looks.
Below are some pellet groups. Starting in the top left 40 yards, top right 45 yards, bottom left 45 yards, bottom right 50 yards.
What I was noticing was that I’d have 2-3 shots landing in the same area then a shot would rise or drop. I don’t know if it was the wind or what. The wind was changing directions on me. A lot of the lateral shifting was my doing. Some of this vertical stuff I’m not sure what was going on with these pellets.
From 10 - 25 yards the groups looked a lot better.
Edited typos and edited for clarity.