Athlon Helos BTR 1-4.5x24

[WARFAB]

I'm switching to the dark side for service rifle competition.
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I heard about this scope a while back and it immediately intrigued me. Athlon designed this scope specifically for service rifle competition and it has a lot of features that make sense. One of those features is big turrets that have zero stops and are clearly marked so that you should never get confused about what dope you currently have dialed in on the scope. That feature became really appealing to me after my disastrous shooting at Camp Perry this year.

After skipping last year at Perry I was having a hard time getting back into a groove this year. After shooting poorly in the P100, I started off my NTI match by cross-firing my only offhand 10 onto the target next to mine. The wind died down and I still shot out to the left on my rapid seated and rapid prone. I got to the 600 yard line and thought I had a really good read on the light wind that was blowing right to left. I dialed in my windage and fired my first shot. It was an 8 out the left. I was feeling so confident about my wind call that I figured the 8 was a flyer and fired a second shot without making a correctly. Another 8. At that point I figured I just sucked at reading the wind conditions and made my correction to get into the 10 ring. During pit duty I was talking with another competitor and based his wind correction, I realized that after the offhand stage I must have had my windage zero off by a complete rotation (2.5 minutes). After the match I was wandering commercial row and got to handle the Athlon scope in the White Oak store. Suddenly the big single rotation windage and elevation dials were looking awfully appealing.

Being a guy on a limited budget, the Athlon being the cheapest scope set up specifically for service rifle made it that much more appealing and/or probable for me to purchase. That night, after checking out the scope in person, I got talking to Jester back at the motel. As we were shooting the breeze (pun intended) out on the porch, I started explaining some of the features to him. Another guy staying a few doors overheard us talking and yelled out "Hey, you want an Athlon scope? I'm trying to sell one." After I haggled with him and talked him down to exactly $0 below the price he originally told me, I bought his lightly used scope.

[WARFAB]

Unpacking the box.......


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The scope comes in a nicely padded box and includes a manual, cleaning cloth, coin cell battery, and allen wrench to adjust the turrets.




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The turrets are big. To give you an idea of how big they are, that's a .357 cartridge.




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25 minutes of clearly marked elevation and 12 minutes of windage in both directions. The 1/4 minute clicks are tactile and line up nicely with the turret hash marks. Shooting Hornady 75 grain HPBT bullets, 12 minutes of windage should be enough to compensate for up to a full value 20mph wind at 600 yards. The windage numbers being marked "L" or "R" is a nice feature that should prevent me from getting confused which way I'm dialing for the conditions. I've heard that can cause problems for people using scopes that only have numerical windage markings.

The 25 minutes of elevation is more than enough for service rifle competition from 200 to 600 yards, but shooting out to 1000 will require using the holdover marks on the reticle. I hope to get a chance to shoot at 1000 yards some day, but right now my main focus is on EIC points. Not having to worry about having an extra turn on my elevation dial should be advantageous in my quest for EIC points.





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Unlike some of the other scopes designed for service rifle competition, the Athlon has a parallax adjustment. It also has illumination for the reticle, but I doubt I'll ever be using it for competition. The parallax adjustment is very stiff, but another competitor who uses this scope told me that is normal. Based on a google search, it would appear as though that's a common trait for Athlon scopes in general.

This Helos BTR weighs in at a beefy 22.9 ounces. It feels solid and I'm hoping it is rugged enough to hold up to the abuse of service rifle competition. Between the weight of the scope and the mount, I'm sure this scope will be a net weight gain for my already 17+ pound rifle. I personally like a lot of weight so I consider this a feature. Whether or not it noticeably impacts the balance of the rifle remains to be seen. My rifle is already a bit muzzle heavy and I'm not too concerned about it.

[WARFAB]

Athlon provides very detailed information about their reticle for this scope. I have no idea how much I'll use holdovers, but for Hearst Doubles rapid fire, it might be handy information to know. I'll have to study up.
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The dot in the center of the reticle is tiny. Really tiny. The shooter who sold me this scope moved to a Nightforce because his eyes aren't good enough to see the dot. I've been shooting irons with contacts to get a good sight picture, and I need my contacts to be able to clearly see the dot. Without contacts the dot and fine center crosshairs are a blurry mess for me, even with the eyepiece focus adjustments. I'm sure that's more of a reflection on my astigmatism and presbyopia than the scope's focus adjustment. I've been talking to another shooter who uses this scope and he suggests that the dot is useful, but you can focus on the crosshairs as well. Either way I'll be using contacts, but I'm very curious to get this scope mounted up and see how the reticle looks over an SR target.

[WARFAB]

I finally got the Athlon mounted to my rifle. I covered my scope mount choice in this thread:

http://avidarms.com/forum/firearms/s...ne-piece-mount

I'm new to scopes and scope mounting, so I figured I'd share some of the details and things I learned in the process of mounting the Athlon to my rifle.

A: The top of the elevation turret knob is NOT square to the scope body and/or reticle.

B: The reticle IS square to the scope body and flat surface on the bottom of the scope.

If you're going to use bubble levels to level this scope to your rifle, then it would probably be more effective to remove the adjustment knob from the elevation turret and place your level on the flat surface underneath it. Another other option is to align the vertical bar of the reticle with a plumb line. The Athlon parallax adjustment will allow you to focus on objects as close as 10' away, so that makes it super easy to align the reticle to a plumb line.

The details of how I arrived at these conclusions:

After messing around with bubble levels for way too long, I thought I had my scope leveled. I decided to check to see if the reticle was aligned with a plumb line. I discovered it was quite a bit off.

I then did quite a bit of online research and found there are some heated arguments about whether it is proper to level the reticle or level the scope body. As I researched more it seemed that the arguments are a bit misguided. If you are just going to be using the reticle for holdovers, then all you have to worry about is leveling the reticle. If you're going to be dialing windage and elevation with the turrets, then it is important to have the scope body and mechanism level so that your adjustments are square to the bore of the barrel. If your reticle and scope body aren't square to each other and you're planning to dial your windage and elevation with the turrets; you've got problems.

After discovering that leveling the top of the turret yielded a reticle that was out of level, I started to get nervous that my scope had serious mechanical alignment issues and wouldn't give me the accuracy I was hoping for.

After much prompting from Jester, I decided to align the reticle with the plumb line and see what that looked like. After making sure the reticle was nice and plumb, I found that the top of the elevation knob wasn't anywhere close to being level. But, I noticed that the flat surface on the bottom of the scope was nice and even with the scope mount. I even checked with feeler gauges and verified that the two surfaces were very parallel. I then snugged down the scope caps a bit and checked to see how level the top of the elevation knob was. It was still way out of level. But, if I turned the elevation knob 10 minutes, the bubble floated up in the opposite direction. At that point I realized that the turret knob wasn't a reliable indicator of how level the scope was. The best methods of leveling this scope are to either level the reticle or use feeler gauges to level the flat spot on the bottom of the scope.

Side note: I've read that some people use playing cards stacked under the flat portion of the scope to level the scope mechanism. I didn't try that method, but just used feeler gauges to confirm the mechanism was level after making sure the reticle was plumb. After getting two out of three possible reference points leveled, I figured I could then check the turret knob to see why it wasn't aligned with the other two.

This might all be old news for a lot of shooters, but it was a learning experience for me.

[WARFAB]

Last weekend I got a chance to quickly sight in at 50 yards, it only took a few clicks to get things zeroed. I then moved back to 200 and my 50 yard zero translated perfectly to 200 yards. If my scope hadn't been leveled properly I would have seen some horizontal shift at 200 yards. I'm feeling pretty good that everything is set up correctly.

Yesterday I tried shooting my first club match with the scope. It was an interesting experience. I suspect shooting with a scope will help improve my standing scores once I figure out the correct adjustment for my rifle cant.

This is an approximation of what the sight picture looks like with the Athlon scope: