Originally published on Accurate Shooter
Doug has graciously allowed me the opportunity to be a early initial beta tester of this device over the past 2+ years as he's developed the Wind Zero.
The utility I see for competitive High Power shooters are:
1. Learning a specific range locations "isms" through practice. Live fire + Wind Zero in varying conditions will have you seeing things sooner and more reliably than just Live Fire unaccompanied by the Wind Zero.
2. Testing and tuning at longer ranges can be problematic due to environmental conditions. Example: We develop a precise and consistent gun at shorter to intermediate ranges, only to learn that when validating that combos performance at longer ranges can leave us scratching our head on what went wrong. The Wind Zero is a great tool to help you identify condition induced outliers from your testing, and help you nail down those small subtle fine tuning changes to get the gun exactly where it wants to be for top performance at long ranges.
3. Strategy development - The Wind Zero will help illuminate that there are better times to shoot than others, and also let you learn your own limitations, weakness, and strengths, in regards to valuing varying conditions. This will help you with the next point.
4. Training- one sure fire way to be good at something like wind reading, is to just to be born good at wind reading. I was not gifted this attribute unfortunately. I've learned along the way, many others feel the same way. The other sure fire way to get good at wind reading, is to practice. The quote about 10000 hours and mastery of a task comes to mind. The Wind Zero is going to raise your game on wind reading, and accelerate your development of wind reading skill as a shooter.
The utility for ELR applications:
1. With the distances involved even with the high horsepower applications out there, often times these targets have under 1 mph of wind uncertainty in order to get a hit vs a miss.
2. Ballistic truing and proofing of ballistic solutions. The current state of the art, with no real peer, is to obtain an Applied Ballistic Doppler derived CDM for your specific combo. But in absence of that, many shooters are using live fire to true there platforms. Mechanical wind effects due to terrain, vegetation, topography etc can induce error into these measurements from the environment that the Wind Zero can help you isolate.
The utility for Long Range Hunting:
1. Where electronics are allowed, the positioning of several Wind Zeros across canyons, or through open meadows or other shooting lanes of opportunity can assist with a larger more in depth system and plan to make more ethical shots on game.
2. Where electronics aren't allowed, this will allow you to survey and scout a potential long range hunting location in the off season, and learn the wind patterns, and indicators you'll have available to use during the actual hunt.
The guy behind the Wind Zero is as good as it gets. He's a Magna Cum Laude Engineer from the University of Texas, with a rich and deep professional career covering a lifetime of assignments and applications that literally cover the globe. On top of his genius, he's also one of the finest Competitive shooters in the Country these last few years, and has been crushing it wherever he goes. Last but not least, the SkogWorx CEO is a damn fine gentleman, and a great American. You'll have a hard time finding anyone that will stand behind there product better than Doug will with his Wind Zero.
My guess is, in very short order, a Wind Zero will be in the range bag of those shooters that want the very best from there guns, and from there own personal performance.
When practicing or testing at ranges in excess of 300 yards, you'll see me shooting with the use of a Wind Zero.
Tim Vaught