Valdada 4.8-30x56Extreme Long Range Shooting specific optics.

What is a Valdada Designed in the United States of America and manufactured in Japan There is a trend for optics to come with more and more internal adjustment to give the potential for shooters to push the accuracy of their rifles out to 1 mile and beyond. The reality of this is that most shooters are never going to need more then 40 MOA of vertical adjustment as this will get even a 308 out to 1,000 meters. But when you do have the range available to push out to 1 mile or further then why not?

The Valdada Recon Gen 2 has the features to make this kind of shooting possible, with a huge amount of internal adjustment available. It achieves this with its huge 40mm tube allowing for 42Mil of internal adjustment, yes that’s not a typo 42Mil of internal adjustment! That’s 144 MOA for those of you who count in old money. The turrets have 10 MIL of elevation per revolution and adjust nicely as you would imagine for a scope in this price range, the windage turret although it looks the same has a different feel and sound when you adjust it, nothing bad but it has a noticeably different feel from the elevation turret.

One thing that is a must in modern tactical style scopes is a zero stop, the one in the Recon Gen Two is about as basic as it gets, all you have to do is remove the turrets and spin the brass ring around to the small stop, then tighten the small allen screw with the provided Allen key. This all only take a minute to set and then your scope is ready to go without the fear of losing zero, an issue that has plagued me over the years with older optics. I am quickly losing interest in optics with complicated zero stops, so this is a huge tick from me for the simple yet effective zero stop.

Arlington Arms has a selection of 40mm rings at your chosen height and a bubble levels to suit the extra large tube diameter, so you can order whatever you need to suite your specific setup, this makes life easy as the 40mm tube diameter is not common here in NZ. Another nice feature is the Tenabrex flip up lense covers that are included in the box, these are a high quality cover so it a plus to have them included.

Enough about the features, what did I mount it on and how dose the behemoth of an optic go on the range? I scratched my head on what rifle to set this scope up on and soon settled on the trusty old Howa 1500 308, why 308? Because it already going transonic at 1,000 meters and requires a lot of vertical elevation to achieve the potential hits at 1 mile. So I thought it would be the perfect platform to dial this scope up and down to see if it dials to where it should.

Now how did shooting the setup go?. I mounted it up on my Howa 1500 and quickly re zeroed the setup at 100 meters, set the zero stop, I then adjusted my ballistic app to suit the new scope and different height over boar. The closest steel target to me at the time was a 500mm plate at 1,100 meters so I dialed my pre existing data and let a shot go. It hit 1 mil of the left so I made dialled the wind correction in the scope then put nine shots on target and between each shoot I returned to zero and then dialled back up to see if it tracked as expected. It did exactly what it should have and the nine shots were in a dinner plate sized group.

The load I was using had previously been validated out to 1,430m so I wasn’t concerned about the accuracy of the rifle or ammunition. 1,630 meters is just a little more then one mile, a bloody long way for a 308. What once seemed like an impossible shot for me to take, was now looking like something that could be achieved with the Valdada perching on top of the Howa 308.

In closing, this is a serious scope for serious long range shooting. If your wanting to push the other limits of your rifles ability then this is a great choice for your extreme long range precision rifle. Head over to www.arlington-arms.com if one of these is something you would like to own.