I received mine last week. I’ve had my first pair since 2014 and they’ve been pretty much flawless. I don’t like to carry a dedicated rangefinder (RF) so the combo optic is best for me. The RF never malfunctioned in 7 seasons. Use-days gotta be over 500 and they’ve never been back to factory. Only complaints are lower limit of 32 yards and the measurement button was on left side
. The new EL Range with Tracking Assistant (TA) remedies both those issues (I’ve ranged down to 12 yards) and right-hand measurements are a cinch.
Swaro’ also added an app connectable via Bluetooth with ballistics bringing it up to current offerings by competitors. I’m surprised it took them this long.
As I’m not a long-range hunter, my main interests in testing the EL is for the optical quality vs. previous Gen and the TA.
I took mine in 8x which could go the way of the mullet but it wasn’t all that long ago I had one
of those too. Seriously, I hike as much as I glass so have always preferred 8x but 10x are much more popular.
I opened mine on Friday night and spent a full hour reading the instructions. There are only two buttons, Measurement on top right
and the Mode button, bottom left barrel.
you operate it with your left thumb while holding the Bino to your eyes.
I’m ADD and really struggle with reading directions and applying what I read—always have. So to say I was frustrated was pretty normal. Just struggled figuring
out the multiple combinations of mode/measurement buttons press sequences to set up the binos. Willing to bet you techy/engineer people would cut that hour to 30 minutes or less.
The next morning I headed for the hills but with blizzard conditions, couldn’t glass. So I spent another hour trying to figure out the TA.
If you’re new to the concept of the TA, it’s designed for you to be able to essentially drop a point with the rangefinder, and then be able to walk to it with reasonable accuracy. This would be handy in the case of locating a downed animal, last location of an animal you shot at, or, stalking a stationary animal when you’re forced to lose visual contact.
(Yes, this brings more technology to hunting and I know they’ll be some critics. But my job for the review is to evaluate how the TA works, I’ll leave the ethics out of it for now. Having information like this will be the only way to have a discussion on the ethics of it anyways.)
So back to the learning curve. I was two hours into using the optic and still had not been able to understand the TA. I would range an object, walk directly to the object so I knew I was in the correct position, yet the TA would indicate I was hundreds of yards off in some cases.
Well if any of you have ever looked at a Swaro instruction booklet, you might know they’re definitely not written by Western US hunters. I was happy to see that they even had words in the booklet. I’ve owned a few optics that were just multilingual pictures which were sort of frustrating.
What I finally figured out is the order of the instruction booklet puts the operation of the TA before the compass calibration. At my peak of frustration, I calibrated the compass, and that fixed the TA. I was able to range objects from 250 yards to 690 yards and with pretty good accuracy, used the TA to walk right to them.
I used both the app with the TA, which would be functional when you’re in cell service, and the Bino only for times you’re out of cell service. Of course that app makes it so simple, but it’s still pretty easy to use with the bino only.
These are a couple of screenshots I took while using the app. The bottom one shows how close it got me to a known object. 8 yards would be pretty close coming from hundreds of yards away.
Actually, I used a vehicle for the longer yardages, and discovered something else. You can’t use the TA in the vehicle, and the instructions even say if you have it within 16 inches of your rifle barrel, it may be inaccurate due to compass interference. So I always had to step away from the vehicle to get it to work.
So far I give it a thumbs up. I want to test it more on actual animals and up and down terrain. If you’re interested in this review, hit the watch button upper right and you’ll be updated when I post.
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