Over the years of competing in long range I have had the pleasure of knowing and competing with Brian Litz. A house hold name in the gun industry I call Brian, affectionately, the ballistics nerd. If you want to know ballistics, you talk to Brian. For many years he worked with Berger Bullets testing and engineering bullets and has written the bible of all loading ballistics books. He recently has designed a program called Applied Ballistics for the computer or as an app. This is a massive library of every rifle, barrel twist, bullet, powder, cartridge out there. You feed it the detailed information of your rifle, ammunition and its velocity and the zeros at 100 yards and it will give you in return suggested zeros for every 25 yards beyond that. The Kestrel is a hand held device that reads your current weather conditions.It will read temperature, average wind, barometric pressure, density altitude, relative humidity, etc. Now Kestrel has married with Brian’s AB program and has a hand held just with that. Before, a shooter had to take the information from the wind meter and manually enter it in to a program app in their phone. Now it is all in one device. No phone or pad needed. If you still wish to work off your phone app you can purchase the Blue Tooth version Although it does require some training it is worth every minute of it. As I am now involved in the sport of precision rifle competition as well, you will see many of the top shooters with a Kestrel in their hands. Now with the entire package all in one, much precious time will be saved out in the field. Why the need for all of this information? Accuracy.

Imagine you are in Ohio in August in 100 degrees and 100% humidity. You have perfect zeros on your rifle and you are hitting all of your targets dead center. A couple of months later you are shooting in Montana with the same rifle and its settings up in the mountains and it is 35 degrees out. You take a shot at a 500 yard target that you had a zero for in Ohio. For some reason the impact came up 2 to 3 minutes higher on the target than you had back East. If you had input the new climate information in your AB Kestrel it would have told you to bring your sight down. For the competitor or sniper that is a loss or a miss. Retail price runs around $750. It is worth every penny. www.nkhome.com/kestrel/