If your interest is accurate shooting with your air rifle at medium to long ranges, this Sightron riflescope has a lot to offer!
There’s no doubt that 10 years of Extreme Benchrest competition has driven the mushrooming interest in long range benchrest shooting.
But it’s not just benchrest. Airguns are being shot at ever-increasing ranges for other reasons, too. Long range hunting, American Field Target competition and even just challenging long range plinking for fun are all huge growth interests.
Then, of course, there’s the amazing increase in power, capability and long range accuracy capabilities that have been engineered into modern PCP air rifles, like those from Daystate and Brocock. Just think of all the effort that’s going into Daystate’s ART program!
And now the long-range airgun shooting game is taking yet another step forward with the introduction of bullet-shaped slugs for airgun use. The big improvements in Ballistic Coefficient offered by slugs, compared to traditional “wasp-waisted” pellets shows to its best effect in shooting at extended ranges.
All of this means that there’s more and more focus on the quality of the riflescopes used on air rifles. After all, those tremendous capabilities in airguns and ammunition – together with your personal shooting skill, of course – is wasted if you can’t see the target properly!!!
That brings us to the need for high quality riflescopes, such as those from Sightron.
Sightron USA is a strongly-backed company with considerable optics and mechanical expertise in both R&D and its own manufacturing facilities in both Japan and Philippines. That’s important to understand: Sightron is not like many other optics companies which simply brand riflescopes manufactured by another company overseas.
Airguns of Arizona has years of experience with Sightron scopes, so their staff can give their own personal opinions if you order by phone. In this blog post, however, we’ll take an overview of the Sightron SIII FT 10 – 50 x 60 riflescopes that are available in a number of configurations, with choices of reticles and turrets.
Sightron SIII Series Field Target 10 – 50 x 60 riflescopes are airgun-ready, with a focus on FT competition. They have a great reputation with Field Target shooters! However, they are suitable for far wider use than just FT competition and practice.
All SIII scopes are designed and manufactured by Sightron itself in its own factory in Japan. For many scope purchasers, such a pedigree is – in itself – a highly-significant factor in their purchasing decision.
Obviously this is a high magnification scope. Yes, it can be used at 12x magnification (the mag limit for traditional Field Target competition). However it has huge potential for precision long range shooting, such as benchrest competition and hunting.
As the name implies, Sightron SIII Series FT 10 – 50 x 60 scopes all have a whopping 5 x magnification range, from 10 x to 50 x magnification. Combined with the 60mm objective lens, this means that they are large scopes and need to be mounted with this in mind. High rings will almost certainly be in order.
I used UTG Pro rings from Leapers to install a Series III FT scope onto a Daystate Revere. The finish of both matched precisely and they worked well together.
Other common specifications for SIII Series FT scopes are an overall length of 26.9 Inches and 30.8 Ounces weight. They all have a 30mm tube diameter and include side parallax adjustment for ranges between 10 and 300 Yards.
Other supplied accessories include a wonderous, 3-Inch long rubber eye cup and a pair of flip-up lens covers. There’s also an instruction sheet giving vast detail about the reticle, its graduations and how to use it.
This makes them ideal for long-range airgun benchrest shooting and hunting, too.
In fact, AoA stocks three models in the Sightron SIII Field Target series. The differences are to be found in the combination of reticle and turret. Two models combine target-style, capped elevation and windage knobs with MOA reticles. One has a Mil-hash reticle combined with tactical (uncapped) turrets.
As Second Focal Plane scopes, the click values (1/8 MOA or 0.5 MRAD) given in for turret clicks in Sightron’s specifications relate to 24 x magnification. They will – of course – represent double the angular distance at 12 x and half at 48x mag.
Although the graduated reticles can be used to calculate a target’s range, most airgunners will likely use them for holdover when shooting instead.
In each case, the reticles can be illuminated – if required – by using the graduated control knob on the eyepiece.
A large, 5-Inch diameter, machined Aluminum sidewheel is included with all FT models for precision ranging. Unlike many sidewheels, this is not pre-marked with ranging distances. Sightron expects that customers for its SIII Series scopes will want to create their own “range tapes” for use with their own specific combination of air rifle, pellet and personal vision.
That marks these scopes out as being intended for serious users! That probably includes you, too. Ask the guys at AoA about them…
