First Look: The New Leupold RX-5000 Laser Rangefinder

Leupold’s new RX-5000 laser rangefinder, which was launched at present, appears and operates like most different Leupold rangefinders. It comprises Leupold’s glorious TBR-with-wind lazing engine, 25 ballistic households that information projectiles, and a number of ranging modes.

However the unit does way more than registering yardage to distant targets and displaying caliber-specific holds for hunters and shooters. Its fundamental worth proposition — and the characteristic that places the RX-5000 in a brand new class of electro-optics — is as a distant finding machine. When paired with the brand new Leupold Management app, the RX-5000 makes use of GPS expertise to remotely drop location pins on digital maps like onX Hunt, Google Maps, Apple Maps, and different mapping apps.

In testing over the previous month, the sensible utility of that characteristic is so apparent that I questioned why it’s not in wider use. The navigation characteristic permits customers to laze a goal so far as 3 miles away. Not solely is the gap and different ballistic data displayed, however customers have the selection of hitting a “Pin Subsequent” command on the app, and the subsequent vary might be displayed as a dropped pin on onX, or no matter mapping app customers want. The pin is recognized with Leupold’s distinctive letter L inside a rifle scope’s crosshair.

It’s a easy and intuitive option to mark the placement of a downed animal, or to find out land possession (relying on functionality of the mapping app) on the location of the goal.

Eric Overstreet, Leupold’s Know-how Product Line Supervisor, says the RX-5000 has its origins in japanese Oregon, the place he confronted issues acquainted to many hunters.

“It’s an space with loads of checkerboarded private property,” says Overstreet. “Fences all over the place from previous homesteads, and never all of the fences signify property boundaries. I used to be searching a property and wished to know if that herd of elk a mile away was on land I might hunt, public land, or the neighbor’s land. I used to be onX, making an attempt to match up landmarks and different options, and I simply couldn’t inform. I assumed it could be helpful to have the ability to ship a waypoint over there to determine if these elk had been huntable or not.”

That’s exactly what the RX-5000 can do, primarily throw a digital stone throughout the panorama after which map the place it lands.

The machine achieves this with a really subtle digital compass that’s tied to the International Positioning System. The compass is aware of precisely the place you might be, because of a selected calibration course of. Upon getting established a waypoint on the mapping app, you should use different options, similar to trail-locating, monitoring, and sharing.

• Weight: 9.7 ounces
• Max Vary on Deer: 2,000 yards
• Max Vary on Bushes: 3,100 yards
• Max Vary on Reflective Objects: 5,000 yards
• Minimal Vary: 6 yards
• Correct inside 2 yards to 1,000 yards
• Subject of View at 1,000 yards: 289 toes
• Battery: CR123
• Battery Life: 3,000 actuations
• Purple show
• 8-power magnification
• True Ballistic Vary
• Distant Waypoint Pinning on onX, Google Maps, Apple Maps, and extra
• Control App Suitable

The RX-5000 Digital Interface

Mapping data is conveyed to customers by two separate cellular app platforms. First is the brand new Leupold Management app. This cellular utility, accessible for Apple gadgets, permits customers to enter ballistics, to fireside the laser rangefinder remotely, and to inform the machine to drop a digital pin on the panorama.

That waypoint is then displayed on a mapping app. The unit is appropriate with onX, Google Maps, and Apple Maps, and sources say that different mapping apps are more likely to be accessible within the Leupold ecosystem sooner or later. Customers can use the Leupold-branded waypoint simply as they’d use conventional waypoints, sharing them with searching buddies, saving them as annotated landmarks, and utilizing their location to study possession, latitude/longitude, and elevation particulars.

It’s price noting that, particularly for brand new customers like myself, each time you mess around with the pinning characteristic, you might be laying down extra digital waypoints. I discovered myself spending many tedious minutes manually eradicating all of the waypoints I established as I used to be merely lazing the panorama.

Navigating the Leupold Management app is straightforward and intuitive. It shows all of the ballistic and ranging data that’s delivered by the machine, but it surely’s a greater person expertise as a result of the app shows data in easy-to-read textual content. The machine shows data in crimson OLED segments. You’ve most likely skilled that complicated suggestions. Is {that a} 9 or a G, represented by cryptic crimson segments? So having an alternate – through the cellular app – to the ranging data is beneficial.

The app additionally permits customers to obtain software program updates and bug fixes instantaneously.

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Rangefinding Functionality

The heart of the brand new RX-5000 might be acquainted to hunters and shooters who’ve deployed Leupold’s in depth line of laser rangefinders. Any unit with the TBR/W ballistic engine — this contains the RX-2800, RX-1400i, and BX-4 Vary HD binocular along with the brand new RX-5000 — has ballistic options that contemplate angle to focus on, projectile traits, and the affect of wind on the projectile.

That wind-compensation functionality – that’s the W within the TBR/W nomenclature — advises customers on holds which can be influenced by a ten mph full wind, which is 90 levels from the shooter from the best or the left. Fractional holds are derived by halving these full wind values, and if the wind is twice the usual worth, customers merely double their maintain.

The RX-5000, which makes use of Leupold’s glorious 905-nanometer ranging engine, has longer attain than its friends.

“In common mode, which is TBR LOS [line-of-sight], the unit will simply vary bushes out to three,500 yards and even farther,” says Overstreet. “However in the event you put it in Lengthy Vary mode, issues get fascinating. It is best to be capable to vary 5,000-yard targets simply, and we’ve gotten ranges out to six,000 yards.”

The flexibility to persistently and exactly vary distances past three miles in Lengthy Vary mode is as a lot science as artwork. The science devolves to discussions of decreasing machine noise and amplifying sensitivity. The artwork requires utilizing equipment and an understanding of which targets have the perfect reflectivity (trace: it’s inexperienced bushes, as a result of chlorophyll within the leaves is particularly reflective to lasers).

“We ship the rangefinder with a tripod saddle, and it’s extremely beneficial for long-range ranging,” says Overstreet. The Leupold Management app permits customers to distant set off the machine, which eliminates hand shake and permits dead-on ranging at longer distances.

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Professionals and Cons of the RX-5000

The RX-5000 TBR/W is a ground-breaker. Its navigational abilities, expressed by the cellular apps, are easy, intuitive, and very helpful for hunters, particularly Western hunters who confront shifting land possession and wide-open vistas in the middle of an outing.

However customers ought to pay shut consideration to the calibration course of required to set the digital compass to customers’ particular location. The person guide exhibits customers how you can tumble the machine so it fixes its exact bodily level within the universe. However even this easy course of is fraught, says Overstreet.

“We do a really superior calibration of every unit on the manufacturing facility with a specialised routine that we spent a pair years creating,” says Overstreet. “However customers are required to do a calibration once they get their machine. The thought is that they’re calibrating their unit to their space and their particular magnetic area.”

Overstreet says the enemies of this digital compass embody the highly effective magnets in lots of binocular and rangefinder harnesses together with ferrous metals of pickups, watchbands, and even cellphones, all of which is able to negatively affect the calibration course of.

“For my part, compass accuracy goes to be the largest buyer problem as a result of there’s not loads of consciousness round compasses and what can affect compasses,” says Overstreet. “Folks have to recalibrate each time they go to a brand new space or in a brand new climate system, and so they should be positive they don’t have ferrous metals round them.”

Exact calibration leads to exact waypoint location. If customers are careless about calibrating their items, then they might obtain imprecise waypoints.

I additionally discovered that Leupold’s established TBR/W engine, with its 25 selectable load teams, is a little bit dated. My check rifle and cargo was a 6.5 Creedmoor and Hornady’s 143-grain ELD-X bullet. However that exact bullet, which I measured with Garmin’s wonderful Xero C1 Pro at 2,690 fps, isn’t included in Leupold’s ballistic teams. So I needed to decide the closest-best load to my favourite bullet, which is among the hottest searching bullets within the pantheon of 6.5 Creedmoor bullets.

Last Ideas on the RX-5000

The worth proposition of the brand new RX-5000 — its capability to remotely place waypoints — is so disruptive that it deserves hunters’ consideration far past its pedestrian ballistics contributions. It is a new animal, and it tackles the intersection of exact place and utilized ballistics each elegantly and intuitively.

Priced at $700, Leupold’s RX-5000 is an funding, but it surely’s additionally the primary iteration of a brand new household of laser rangefinders that can even assist you discover your means house. It’s exhausting to place a greenback worth on that functionality.