I was looking at rangefinders the other day. I almost bought one with true ballistic range but something just didn't look right to me. The illistration showing a 40 yard line of sight distance and a 34 yard true ballistic range. It didn't show the height of the tree stand. I punched the numbers into the old calculator. The height of the tree stand in the illistration would be 63 feet. Might have to do a little welding on the ladder stand to get up that high. I then calculated what the true ballistic range would be for a 20 foot high stand. It came out to be 39 yards. That's only a yard difference from line of sight distance. I also did line of sight distances of 20 and thirty yards with the 20 foot high stand. True ballistic range was only about 1 yard closer with each distance.

I wouldn't invest any extra money into a rangefinder with true ballistic range if you hunt fairly flat ground. It might help a little in steep terrain, but that opens another can of worms as the angle may be too severe to get a good ethical shot.

Thanks for the informative post,

Been looking at rangefinders, and this True ballistic range thing has been discussed in other threads with similar conclusions. For long ranges, mountains, steep elevation changes, it is definitely helpful, but I think at 20' on flat terrain bowhunting out to 30 yards it is only going to produce a yard or 2 of difference (at least that was other people's conclusion).

just look at it like a triangle side a squared + side b squared = side c squared