Leica Geovid HD-B with G7 mystery

[jlow]

I’ve been looking at this bad boy because I want a good pair of binoculars with a RF and build in ballistic solver. So far, I’ve held back because of a few reasons. One is it does not report holdovers in MIL but MOA. There is a poster “Uncon” on the PrecisionRifleBlog that mentioned after the site review this instrument that it is possible using the Ballistic Output Format of “10”. Little hokey but if it works.

The second reason is even though it does allow you to build a custom ballistic curve, it only use G1 and not G7, however the same poster said that “The Leica software for your desktop PC WILL allow a G7 ballistic curve” to date, I have not figure this out.

I have found two totally different website from Leica to build the custom ballistic curve which is kind of strange. One is here:

http://precisionrifleblog.com/2013/12/12/leica-geovid-hd-b-review/

The second one is here:

http://leicaflash.leica-camera.com/leicadroptest.html

The second one is actually called the “Leica G7 Ballistic Calculator” but when I entered G7 values for a value, it is off and it appears only G1 values gives anything remotely close.

Anybody have any experience deciphering this?

 

[jlow]

Done some Google search and came up with this which is very interesting.

https://www.bisontactical.com/blog/how-to-setup-your-leica-hd-b-ballistic-calculator/

Anybody tried this?

 

[cmor]

I have and love Leica HD-B's.

Their interface is a little clunky, but to my knowledge there are no other products that hold a candle to them. Having instant rifle corrections that take shot angle, temperature, pressure (altitude) into account, inside the bino's that you are looking through anyway is great.

They do work well for mils, just select the "10" option - it's 10 clicks per mil, which will match your mil based rifle. I have changed from moa to mil scope to use this.

The moa options aren't great in my opinion. If you set it for MOA, it gives you corrections rounded off to the nearest MOA, which obviously isn't ideal for long range work (It's a no-brainer that they should show the correction to the nearest 0.1 MOA). If you set it for 1/4 moa, it gives you the correction in the number of 1/4moa clicks, which didn't work well for me. I don't want to have to divide by 4 quickly in my head when making quick shot decisions while hunting.

My other gripe about the product is that you can only load custom ballistics for one rifle. Not a huge deal to change cards for each rifle, but it would be so simple to allow more.

The G1 only isn't a big deal. When I compare the corrections out to any practical hunting distance, the difference between the Leica G1 solution and my other ballistic apps is minimal.

 

[jlow]

Thanks for your respnse. Your assessment is similar to mine about the clunky interface but at least one only has to go through the “adjustment” once for each caliber you are going to use this thing for.

I know of the “10” option but did not realize the poor option for MOA. I wonder what the deal is? Seems almost like they intentionally semi-disable this thing on purpose, or at least made it so that it really works well only for “hunters” and God forbid any “tactical shooters”…

From what I can see, one can completely overcome the “G1” only limitation using the method described in the above link. In fact, they were using the “custom drag curve” that I use in my AB devices i.e. AB Kestrel.

About the only thing that I wonder about is what negative effect is there to have to be forced to use 5 cm (1.97”) sight height? My actual sight height is 2.5” so it will be only 0.5” off? I am guessing very little for tactical shooting but…

To follow up on the above, I ran a simulation with the AB software. So for the two sight height in question i.e. default 5 cm (1.9685”) vs. mine 6.35 cm (2.5”) at 600 yards and 1k, the elevations (inches) for the two distances were 93.00” vs. 90.34” and 369.32” vs. 364.53”, respectively. So 2.66” and 4.79” difference.