Video Transcript
This is the most complicated device that we sell here at T.REX ARMS, but it's also a device that can give you a lot of capability if you're interested in getting into precision shooting. Now there's a lot of misconceptions about Kestrel devices. I had a lot of misconceptions when I was first getting into precision shooting. I thought this was just a device that would tell me how fast the wind is. You turn the device towards the wind stream that's coming in, the fan spins, and it tells you 12 miles an hour, or however much it is. I had my first Kestrel class, it was around two hours long learning all the different specifics about this device. Because not only is this a measuring instrument for pressure, temperature, wind, compass heading, and all kinds of other things, it also has a ballistic computer on board. Well, at least this device does. This is the Kestrel 5700 Elite. There are other devices that are less expensive, that have less functionality. This one has the applied ballistics computer built into it, and it has all the measuring instrument stuff inside of it that the regular Kestrels have.
There's another version of this, the 5700 Elite X, that can process the data and a firing solution for ELR, so shooting targets 2,000-3,000 meters out. But most people probably don't need that device, and so we are offering the 5700 Elite. It's a little bit cheaper, but it still has all the functionality, just not that super fast processor for shooting targets super far away. Now there's a lot of good videos on how to use this device on YouTube already, and kestrel actually, I want to commend them for the FAQ materials they have on their product pages, has extensive materials on how to use this device all the different ways. So what I'm going to do instead, is I'm going to tell you guys how I'm using the device, and how I set one up, because I'm not using every single piece of functionality in this, I'm using it just for setting up guns, and most of what you can use a Kestrel for, and I think it'll still be educational and useful to many of you. So here is the device, here's what it includes.
You have the Kestrel itself, a lanyard, which I highly recommend weaving onto the device, a small little carrying case, which doesn't matter, and some quick start guides, which you can use or not. First things first, we are going to attach the lanyard. And the reason you want this is when you're pulling a temperature reading or an environmental reading at the start of a range day you want to spin this through the air so it gets a lot of air flow. It's just kind of how it pulls all the environmentals all at once. And the best way to do that is to have a lanyard so you can spin it around. So now we can do the spinning, spinning. To remove the batteries, there is a small latch here at the bottom with a lock unlock. So you're going to push that into the unlock position, lift up. There is already a energizer battery inside, conveniently. And I do recommend lithiums, no alkaline. So we're going to power the device on. Power button's down here at the bottom.
The device has now come to life. We'll also give you a battery reading as it's launching. And this one is full bars. So I'm going to show you guys how I would take this new Kestrel and start moving gun profiles over to it. So the first thing we're going to do is hit settings and make sure Ballistics Mode is on. We're going to make sure Bluetooth is on. You can calibrate the compass. We'll actually do that first, because why not? You're going to hold the Kestrel upright. We are going to rotate it slowly for 30 seconds. So it's going to be panning all around the Earth. So start for 30 seconds. We're going to spin it.
Every time you change battery, it's like doing a hard reset. You have to start this process. You have to do this process each time. And the reason you want to calibrate the compass is so that you can pull a direction of fire. Based on what degrees you're shooting into, that's for the Coriolis Effect Flatter Theory. And based on what twist rate your gun is shooting into certain directions, that will change your trajectory to some extent. Should be good. Calibration complete. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go to Bluetooth. We're going to go back up to the top. Bluetooth on.
You could swap between connecting a device-- there's PC slash mobile. There's device connect. Those are your two options. This is where you would connect to a Raptor, a laser range finder, or some other system that is compatible, or a Kestrel HUD, which is actually a little digital dope card you put on the side of your rifle. It's pretty nifty. You can also create a bunch of targets on there for a stage, have it all right there. But what we're going to do is we are going to connect a mobile device. I highly recommend that you download-- and Kestrel does too. They have an app, Kestrel Link Ballistics. The Kestrel 5700 Elite has Bluetooth built in, so it can talk to phones. That is the link functionality.
So now I'm going to go into my Kestrel app, connect device, and I can see Elite 2896079. I'm going to tap that. Connection in progress. Authenticated. And if I go to here, you'll see a little green Bluetooth symbol. That means I am connected to the device. You could turn on a privacy pin, which I highly recommend if you're around a lot of shooters who are using these so they can't jump in and mess with all your dope. So it's reconnecting. All right. So now it wants me to put in the password, which is displayed here on my Kestrel. My unique pin. Personal identification number. This is what it stands for. 4, 7, 8, 9. OK. We are authenticated and connected. Now, before we actually take gun profiles from my phone and move them over, because I already have profiles, I want to show you guys how to make them in the device itself.
So if you scroll down from the main menu, so you get out of settings, click Settings again, and now you're on the home screen, which shows your dope. It shows what elevation you need to hold for that particular target and the wind. That's your home screen. Click on Gun. So we currently have a profile called User Gun 1. This is going to show my muzzle velocity, 2650. So that's somewhat average. My ballistic profile is a G1. The ballistic coefficient of the round, it's a 0.475. It's a 175-grain bullet. So this is probably a 308 round by default. Yep, 308 right there. Zeroing at 100 meters. My bore height is 275, which is pretty average. And there's some other stuff here. My twist rate is 111. So my twist rate would actually be 1 in 10 for this Daniel. And technically, the round would be 6.5, not 308. So you can build a gun on the Kestrel itself. You can build a whole profile. If you know the BC of your round, all the details behind it, you can do that in the Kestrel itself.
However, it is far easier to use the Kestrel app to build out your guns because it has a bullet library saved in here that's constantly being updated. So to build a weapon, all I do is I have a new profile. I'm literally going to call it DD5V4, 6-point-- this is Federal ammo. So Fed 140. I'll say Fed 2 because I already have a profile in here. Select from bullet library. So then I'm going to say select from bullet library. I'm going to find 6-5, 2-6-4. There's 400 bullets saved in here, over 400. I'm going to go down to Sierra because I'm shooting a Sierra match king. And I'm shooting the Sierra match king 140 grain round.
I'm going to select the G7 drag model. You guys can do more research on that in the future. I just use G7 by default. And then down here, I have my specific gun data. Now it's feeding in a default muzzle velocity that's off of the box, which is 2650. I can start working off of that, but I need to chrono the gun to actually find out exactly what muzzle velocity the gun is. And then eventually truing the gun, which will give me a much better picture of what the gun is actually doing. I'm zeroing for 100 meters. My bore height is 275. I'm just going to say that. What you would do is you would measure from center of bore to center of scope. 275 is pretty consistent for a lot of guns, but I even have some that are 2.8, 2.9, like weird stuff. So you want to get that in there. The twist rate on this rifle, I believe, is 1 in 10. So we want to change that, 1.0.
And everything else here looks good. I happen to know, because I've already chronoed this gun, that my muzzle velocity is not 2650, like it says on the box. My muzzle velocity is 2545, which is actually very slow, because I have not broken the gun in, and it will speed up as the barrel gets a little bit fouled. So it'll probably get up to like 2580 or something like that. So we have the weapon. We're going to say save. So I now have that. It's at the top, DD5U4, Fed 2, select, gun, send profiles. I am connected to this device. It's going to ask, are you ready to override all of your data on the Kestrel? The answer is yes. You can't send individual profiles. Every time you want to dump data from your phone to the Kestrel, it is going to override everything on the Kestrel. So if you have three gun profiles on the Kestrel, you've just built another one on your phone, you're going to want to send all four over to the Kestrel all over again. It will be the three originals and the one new one. I'm going to say override. Yes, I know it will override.
The thing you definitely want to be careful of is you can send the weapon profiles upstream from the Kestrel to your phone, and you don't want to do that. The phone is always upstream from every device. The phone sends profiles to the Kestrel. The Kestrel sends profiles to a Raptor or other device, and you never send stuff back upwards. That's how you run into issues and lose valuable data. So now we have the data on the Kestrel. So you can see down here, I have a gun selected, DD5, V4, Fed2. So now I have the bullet data from the library on the device. I have all the weapon data, how high the scope is, all that good stuff. And now I can actually start to do some fun things. I can now go down to my range card and actually see what my gun would be doing at different holds, different distances. I can see my remaining velocity that it is estimating with math and science. I can see the spin drift. I can cycle through here. I can see how much the Coriolis effect is going to affect it, all kinds of interesting things, and how much the wind is going to affect it as well. But I want to see remaining velocity. So I can build a dope card from here. That's very cool.
And it's called range card. The other thing that we can do, we're going to go into settings, is we are going to turn on, we go into system, accuracy first. We are going to turn this on. This is how we can do some fun calculations for speed drop, like I've talked about in a few of the videos about the nightfall scopes. We're going to go back to our weapon. We're going to be in the main menu. And now when you scroll down, you will have a listing called accuracy first. We're going to click on that. In order to utilize accuracy first, you have to turn your environment off. So right now, when the environment setting is live, it is pulling information every second or so.
The problem is, as it's pulling environmentals, it's going to be changing your dope. It's going to be changing your accuracy first calculation. So you have to lock that so it locks in the environmentals so it can then do some calculations and do some math. So we're going to lock the environment at 78 degrees. It's pretty warm in here right now. We're going to go down to accuracy first. And now I can calculate my quick wind, my wind dots, if I'm using a Tremor 3 reticle. But the main thing I'm interested in is actually my speed drop. And quick wind is important, too. So here it's going to tell me that if I dial backwards on my scope 1.3 mils, if I left some room as I zeroed my turrets, I can convert my scope into a BDC from 114 meters all the way out to 532. So 1 to 5. I can hold on 1 mil for 100 meters, 5 for 500, and I'm good to go. That's an accuracy first function. My quick wind, I can calculate that as well. It's a 4.4 mile an hour gun. My wind dot, I can calculate that. That's what each wind dot in my Tremor 3 reticle is going to represent, which is 4 miles an hour. So now I have some additional information about this gun specifically. And at the top, this is where you can start to punch in data for an individual target to give you a firing solution.
So if you have a single target activated, you can have multiple targets activated at once. The way you do that is you actually click on target. You'll see target A. You could cycle through target A, B, C, D. I have shot courses of fire where I actually punched in data for, I think, 10 different targets. And I'm actually cycling through those, and I build in my data ahead of time, so the inclination of the distance of the target. And I actually build that in here, so all I have to do is punch through targets A through whatever the last letter is. And it gives me the firing solution pretty much instantly because it's already calculated it. In this case, since none of the targets are activated, which you would do by coming down here to the bottom-- I know this is a lot. Like I said, this is a complicated system. Actually, it's at the top. You're going to say active.
We're going to say the target is not active. If all the targets are inactive when you're on your target display and you start using the arrow keys, you are going to push the meterage of the target for it to make a calculation on. So 863 meters, using the current data that I have for this rifle, I'd be holding 9.66 mils to engage that target, at which point I could dial 9.6, 9.7, or I could hold in my reticle 9.6 or 9.7. Now, wind. This is where it gets really fun because you'll see E for elevation at the top, and you'll see W for wind. When you hit the illumination button twice, you bring up a different feature that's showing you live environmentals. In this case, it's showing me a time. So you're going to cycle through these with your up arrow keys, or you're down. So you'd see all this fun information that's being listed--temperature, chill, humidity, heat index, dew point, wet bulb.
It's very important. Just kidding. I don't know what that is. So there's all this stuff that is pulling. My altitude, 700 feet. Good to know. But what I want is wind speed right here. This is going to be my default. So when I hit my little illumination button twice really quickly, it brings me to wind. And this is where if I activate or deploy my little wind fan, and I hold this towards the wind, it is going to give me a wind speed, at which point, once I know my wind speed-- exit out here--I go down into wind from target, and I can give myself a bracket. So let's say in the process of holding up my kestrel, I see it's 10 miles an hour at the peak, and it's settling at about seven. We want to have the bracket as close together as possible. We are also going to indicate from which direction the wind is coming. So in this case, I'm going to say 3 o'clock, so it's full value approaching from the right side.
It is going to then, as I push the distance of the target-- let's come down, let's say 530 meters-- it will tell me that the wind is going to be anywhere from a 0.7 hold to a 1.1 hold inside of that bracket. And then upon shooting, I need to then make that estimate myself of is the wind dying down or is it picking up. But it gives me a ballpark of roughly how much I'm going to have to hold using the data of this gun that the kestrel is calculating. If I start to push the distance of the target-- so we'll go back up to 800-ish meters--you're going to see, wow, I got to hold 1.3 all the way up to 2. And that's only a 10-mile an hour wind. I've shot up to, I think, 30, where it was insane. And I'm holding many target widths away in order to land anywhere close to the target. Wind is the most difficult thing in precision shooting, and it changes all the time, and it's hard to understand. And I've shot in situations in the mountains where I have one wind coming at me from the right. There's another wind further out from the left, and there's an updraft pushing my bullet high. And that's where you just have to be able to make a guesstimate, an educated guesstimate, based on the environment what's going on, see your shot, and make a fast follow-up. And some days you never hit anything, and some days you hit things decently. So that's how you're going to operate the wind features on this device and the target.
But again, the kestrel is a highly complex device. There's a lot that you can do with it. This is primarily how I'm using it. I'm storing lots of gun profiles on it. I'm using the calculations on this device to create dope cards for my rifles, like on this Daniel. But one of the most important things that you can utilize this device for is after you input some data for the rifle, you're going to click on Gun. And you're going to click on Muscle Velocity. So right now I have 2545. So that is what I chronoed at the muzzle using this Federal Sierra Match King 140-grain ammo. And you're going to see a button here called Cal-MV. What this is going to do is this is where you are going to true the rifle. And what trueing the rifle means is using the data that I have, that I've inputted into this 2545 muzzle velocity, I'm going to set a target distance. You want to go as far as you can. A lot of people true at 900 before the bullet starts to go transonic and even subsonic in some cases. But at my range, the furthest I could shoot is 600 meters. So I'm going to say range 600 meters.
It's going to tell me precisely with a muzzle velocity of 2545 and the environmentals that I pulled that day, spinning my device, that I need to hold 5.1 mils to guarantee a hit on a target at that distance. So at which point I'll be in the prone, I will be bagged, I will have the most stable position possible, I will dial to 5.1, and I will take a shot on that target and see if it's correct. If I land a hit on 5.1 at that distance, then the 2545 feet per second is accurate. What you will find in most cases though, is the muzzle velocity of the round coming out of the barrel is not going to create the best calculation when you actually start shooting at distance with different environmentals. Basically how thick the air is, how much drag the bullet is producing as it's flying through the air, and it's either going to slow down or it could potentially speed up depending on the values here. Typically what you're going to see though is, you're going to have a slower feet per second when you actually start to shoot at a target further away. So in this case, I may engage this target at 600 meters, I see I'm way low of the target, and as I dial, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, at 5.4, I'm now hitting the target where I'm actually aiming, so the dope is off, something is wrong here.
So then I'm going to go to drop, I'm actually going to say, "Hey, you know what? I was hitting the target at 5.4, not 5.1, and I can indicate that in the device." I'm going to say it was 5.40 to hit the target at 600. It is then going to calculate a new feet per second value for that day that I am shooting, and that is truing the rifle. That is going to create a more realistic for the rifle when I'm actually trying to shoot a target further away, because it is pulling all the environmentals and the conditions, and it's actually tracking basically the muzzle velocity of what's happening at that distance, instead of what is happening when the bullet is immediately leaving the barrel. The first thing you want to do when you're trying to build a gun profile is chronoing at the muzzle, that gets you in the ballpark. The second thing you want to do is truing the gun as far as possible. Think about the max distance though being about 900 meters. So now that I know, hey, my velocity is actually 2488 for a really true experience, I'm going to hit exit. It's going to say, "Yo, are you ready to add this muzzle velocity from 78 degrees Fahrenheit, 2488?" The answer is yes, I absolutely want to. Yes, I'm accepting that, and now it says, "MV is calibrated." We're then going to exit out of here, and now what you're going to see is you're going to go down to your dope card, your range card, and all your data is going to be completely different. So if I look at my dope card here, I have printed, let's scroll through here.
At 500 meters with the new information after truing the rifle, I would be holding 3.9, and for 500 on my original dope card, it was 3.8. So not a colossal difference, we're talking a tenth of a mil, but it is going to become more of an issue when we start shooting a little bit further away. And on top of that, as you track environmentals every day, the start of a range day, you spin the Kestrel at the beginning of the day, your dope card's going to change as well. Maybe the air is super thick and nasty, maybe the temperature's dropped. Where I shot up in Idaho in the mountains where we were truing our guns at the start of every range day, I was seeing my experience with that rifle changing every day. And then if it heats up, well, now some stuff is going to be different as well. So you're constantly chasing more appropriate information, and the best way to do that in the instrument that we have for chasing that is the kestrel. It is a device that's able to pull all the environmental conditions and make calculations on the fly right then based on the environmentals, based on the information you give it about your rifle, and it can then give you a firing solution that is hopefully mostly correct.
As you can see, this is a highly complex device, but it can do things that the average human simply cannot. I can't tell you exactly how humid the environment is that I'm at, or if I change a little bit of elevation, or also tracking what direction of fire I'm shooting at, or if I hit this little red button, I can actually pull a direction of fire, and then how that's going to affect the round that I'm shooting based on the twist rate, if it's right-hand twists, and I'm shooting into this spin of the earth, and you're adding all this stuff together, but this device can do it all by itself in literally tenths of a second and then spit out a firing solution. So if you're someone interested in getting into precision shooting, this is a device that I highly recommend.
Pretty much everyone in the professional world has one. Now, how often they pull it out to use it for something versus relying on dope cards or their ballistic computer on their gun, or if you spent so much time on that rifle, they know what's going on, it's going to vary individual to individual. I've seen some guys use this pretty much all the time in the mountains because they're having to pull environmentals that regularly, and I've seen other guys just pull it out, use it at the beginning of the day, put it away, and then they rely on the ballistic computer on their rifle, their dope card, or just manually milling targets through their reticle. If you have any other questions about the Kestrel, you can do two things. You can either email us at team@trex-arms.com, or you can go to Kestrel's website, click on 5700 Elite, go to the FAQ section, and it explodes into tons of stuff on how to do different things.
They even have PDF printouts that are going to look something like this that talk about, in this case, maximum point blank range, what is that, and how to get to that on your device with screenshots of the Kestrel itself. There is just so much to unpack with a device like this, but I'm really thankful that this exists simply because it can improve the capability of any marksman and any precision shooter if you take the time to understand how this device functions. Thanks for watching.