bassinbrian said:
ok, so say im 20ft. high and have a target at 40 yds, am I 2ft high or low? I do practice from elevated stands but want to make sure each shot i take is a good ethical shot.
Given that scenario, your point of impact will be roughly where you aimed; however, the steeper the angle the higher your point of impact will be from where you aimed. For example, if you are 20ft high and your target is 10 yards your point of impact will be roughly 1" higher, or so depending on your setup, than where you aimed. However, the further away from you the target is the more time it has to react, so in the case you presented I would put my pin on the heart and plan on the deer reacting and my arrow hitting the mid-point and catching both lungs, and maybe the top of the heart if I'm lucky.
As far as where to range.....I always range from my tree to various obvious points on the ground (stumps, rocks, misc objects, trees, barespots, etc...) as soon as I get in tree and at various times of boredom during the hunt to set my perimeter and memorize those set yardages in case I don't have time to range the deer when the moment of truth happens. If you're hunting private land and have set stand locations, you can go in before season with different colors of flagging tape and tape off a perimeter around your stand using corresponding colors that represent certain yardages. Unless you will be shooting very, very extreme long-distance angles, you will find the angle compensating feature is not needed for 95% of the terrain around here�2yd distance difference most of the time as previously mentioned, which means that it doesn't mean a lot, as it is within 98% of all archers tolerances of accuracy.
Practice at varying yardages to see what difference your point of impact is at those corresponding yardages.
