Hunting is a favorite sport during the leisure time for most of you. It helps you enjoy the wild and also indulge in some sort of adventure with your friends or even, sometimes, alone. There was a time when hunting was based on your guesswork. You had to guess the distance to a target and shoot accordingly. If you were lucky you could bag your kill or miss the chance. Thankfully, hunting has become very simple in this modern era. This is due to the availability of laser rangefinders. These gadgets tell you an accurate distance to your next target that makes hitting the bull’s eye really simple.
How Do Laser Rangefinders Work?
When you work with a laser rangefinder, it makes your task as a hunter really simple. However, it is important for you to understand how the rangefinder actually works. The gadget basically operates by measuring the time taken for a beam of light to return to a detector in the rangefinder after hitting a target. The emitter in a laser rangefinder shoots out an infrared laser beam that hits targets, which may be a tree or a rock or even an animal. After hitting the target, the light reflects off of it and returns to the rangefinder. The detector in the device detects the light and reads the reflection. It later feeds it to a digital signal processor as raw data.
The DSP in the rangefinder figures out the ambient noise that may include stray sunlight which contains IR energy and filters it out. The remaining is the time taken by the laser to hit a said target. The wider the beam the more the DSP has to deal with rubbish data. This will also give rise to the possibility of you not getting any proper reading from your rangefinder.
Amongst all the rangefinders available in the market, the factor that differentiates a moderate rangefinder from the best of the lot is a proper combination of the signal processing power and the software. This happens to be the brain of the rangefinder and is also known as the processing engine of the device. This feature also helps the rangefinder discriminate a target from other objects and visual noise that surround the target.
It is needless to say that the performance of the engine of a rangefinder is more important than the actual beam divergence of the unit. However, it is not possible for you to compare the engine’s processing performance just like the beam divergence measurement on any spec sheet.
It is needless to say that the alignment of the reticle, detector, and emitter are crucial to the actual ability of a rangefinder to perform. There is no simple technique to test the absolute alignment of a rangefinder. However, you can certainly get a rough idea about how close a laser’s POI and POA are by just lasing telephone posts with the blue sky in the background. If you notice that the reticle is on the pole but unfortunately the rangefinder is not getting a return, then there is something wrong with the device.
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