SRO false dot with a low sun angle
This weekend, my wife and I shot a two day match at our winter time local club. The match starts early, and a known issue is when the sun comes over the berm behind certain targets. My wife shoots a Romeo 3 Max, which is awesome with low sun angles. I was using an SRO.
On the second stage, as luck would have it, I encountered an in-line plate rack near the end of the stage with the sun right behind it. It was only about 12 yards, and I didn’t give it a second thought. I was firing, watching the dot lift, hearing the sound of impacts on the steel, but the plates weren’t going down. This went on for nearly a magazine, and finally I turned to the RO and asked if he was going to stop me because of a range equipment failure. He said “no, that I was hitting the splash guard low below the plate rack.” I was like WTF. At that point I reloaded and shot some targets left and right of the plate rack, including some harder targets like skunks with no issue. We went over to the plate rack and it was working properly, and there was a magazine of hits tightly clustered at the bottom of the plate rack on the splash guard.
What we figured out, was with the sun directly behind the inline plate rack, I was getting a false dot with the SRO, and shooting the wrong dot. As I mentioned, the Romeo 3 Max has no false dots. My experience with the RMR and DP Pro is you will get splatter with a low sun angle, but that makes it obvious what is going on. The SRO can suck you in because the false dot looks just like the real dot.
We had dinner with a friend who was at Nationals, and the SRO was a big enough problem there at Frostproof in the morning that numerous competitors were putting blue tape over the front SRO lens and shooting it occluded on the morning stages. My friend had taped his SRO over the first two stages at this match, although I didn’t know at the time since we were on different squads.
Obviously this ruined my match, but if you were depending on the SRO for something serious, and encountered the wrong sun angle, it could lead to a bullet striking somewhere you weren’t intending for it to go.