A Great App for Shooters: iSnipe
When it came time for our cell phone upgrades, my husband suggested we go get iPhones. Now, the practical side of me said I don’t need anything that extravagant and the technically challenged side of me didn’t think I needed anything that complicated. Well, since the upgrade, I don’t know how I ever got along without my iPhone. I rarely go anywhere that I don’t have it within my reach.
There are hundreds of apps available, with new ones coming out every day, but one that I found extremely useful for shooting and reloading is iSnipe. As a ballistic calculator app, iSnipe will let you determine the trajectory of your factory ammunition or even your reloading ammunition if you know your velocity, bullet weight and ballistic coefficient. The nice thing about iSnipe is if you don’t know your ballistic coefficient, you can use a factory load that utilizes the bullet that you are loading. An example, Federal Premium lists a factory load listing a Nosler Accubond bullet, giving you the ballistic coefficient. It has basically every caliber that you can imagine to reference by most every ammunition manufacturer of factory ammo.
What makes iSnipe a must for the serious shooter is it removes the guesswork out of where your bullet is at any point in its flight from the muzzle to the target. It’s easy to use. All you have to do is select your ammunition and it will load the ballistic coefficient, the projectile weight and the factory muzzle velocity for you. You then determine the zero range and the site height (the height of the scope reticle above the bore). You can also enter wind velocity, wind angle, the maximum range you wish to compute and the step size; i.e. 25 yards, 50 yards, 100 yards. You can select the atmosphere function and it will predetermine for you the wind velocity, wind angle, temperature, barometric pressure and relative humidity.
It also has an altitude function based on your height above sea level. Once you’ve entered in all the above information, you simply press compute. iSnipe will show you the range in yards, the path of the bullet in inches, diminitive angle, wind drift in inches, windage diminitive angle, velocity at each range, energy at each range and the flight time of the projectile in seconds. You can then select a yardage.
For example: Let’s say that you are shooting a .308, 168 grain bullet that has a ballistic coefficient of 0.45 and a muzzle velocity of 2,713 feet per second. Your rifle is zeroed at 200 yards and your sight-height is two inches above the bore. To give a really good example, we’re going to add a wind velocity of 15 miles per hour, 90 degrees of the target. And for this example, we’re going to use a max range of 600 yards. By selecting the 600-yard range on the results screen, you will open a details screen. This screen allows you to see where your hold point would be on the target in the following degrees: diminitive angle, mil, and clicks (you tell iSnipe whether you have an eighth minute or quarter of angle scope). In this scenario using diminitive angle, the wind being at 15 miles an hour, coming right to left, your adjustment would be 7.64 diminitive angle right and 13.19 diminitive up. If you do your job behind the rifle, the bullet path will put you on target.
The cost of iSnipe is $5.99, but the money you save by not wasting ammo far outweighs the cost.
