Home Nikon MOA vs. MRAD in Scope Adjustments

MOA vs. MRAD in Scope Adjustments

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Gunsite Academy Range Master, Cory Trapp explains the key differences between MOA and MRAD and how to make adjustments in your scope. Check out Gunsite Academy to learn more about long range shooting and other shooting courses:

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35 COMMENTS

  1. So,…having a click value of 1rad = 1cm@100m/10cm@1000m and Milliradian is based on the Latin word Millle = 1000. Maybe, he's thinking of French, NATO, Russian mils or Swedish Streck in artillery sights? Based on 360° or 2π.

  2. Good video, Im trying to figure out —what is the moa at 8x, 10x, 12x, 15x, etc, etc, zoom at 100 yards given that at 6x zoom it is 1.50 moa? Im trying to figure out what the best reticle is? The dot at 100 yards at 6x is 1.50 moa…. This is a Second Focal Plane. Is there a formula? Thanks….

  3. "Tolerance stack error"…..thank you for explaining one rather obscure concept with another piece of jargon nonsense. Luckily I understand it without your attempt here to be clever as hell.

  4. A circle is 360° or 2π radians. 2π is approximately 2*3.14159265359=6.28318530718. Therefore, one circle is 6.28318530718 radians, or 6283.18530718 milliradians. So 1 MRAD is 1/6283.18530718 of a full circle. One minute, on the other hand, is 1/(360*60)=1/21600 of a full circle. Thus one minute is a smaller angle than one milliradian.

  5. Of all the many "MOA vs MRAD" videos that I've seen, NOT ONE has ever pointed out how simple MRAD can be, and I fear that most viewers here would have turned off MRAD as soon as you said there were 6,283 mils in a circle. At that point, you lost almost everyone.
    It was only in the last 3 seconds of this video that you sprang the secret – which is the 1 to 1000 relationship between target size and range. Unfortunately, you dropped those few words without explaining how powerful they are. And that's the reason why MRAD is not as popular as it should be. American shooters in particular, thinking that MRAD is metric, are likely to switch off and fall back to the common conversion of 1 MOA = 1 inch @ 100 yards, which is convenient but not very accurate beyond a few hundred yards.

    As you clearly understand but unfortunately did not explain – let alone emphasise – the power of MRAD ranging lies in that simple fact: that the range is 1000 times the target size, whether those values are expressed in inches, yards, centimetres, metres or cubits! If a target is judged to be – as in your example, 18 inches – and it covers 1 mil, then the range is 18,000 inches, or 500 yards. If the target covers 3 mils, obviously it's closer and you need to divide the 18,000 inches by 3, which is 167 yards.

    Similarly, if think metric and your target is 50 cm tall and it covers (or subtends), 2 mils then the range is 50,000 cm / 2, or 250 metres. The convenience of using metric units here is obvious, as it does away with calculations requiring a calculator to convert inches to yards. In this last example, 25000 cm is easily converted mentally to get 250 metres, provided the shooter has a basic understanding of the metric system, which is where many Americans come up short.

    Furthemore, if you're Noah and still use cubits, then you will probably still find a calculator necessary. But the 1000 to 1 relationship will still give you the correct answer in cubits.

    Yours is one of the better explanations I've seen, but it could still benefit from making this simple point – maybe without the cubits!

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