An interesting feature of this tripod is that the center post does not extend from the center of the leg triangle, like every other tripod I have used. At the top of the leg triangle (I don’t know what else to call it), there is a 1/4”-20 post surrounded by a spring-loaded retractable 3/8”-16 collar. You can screw the ball head down directly to the leg triangle of the tripod if you want. That will engage the 3/8” threaded collar. If you do that, the only height adjustment you have is lengthening or shortening the leg lengths.

The tripod does come with a center post, but it is a separate piece. To use it, you screw it down on top of the leg triangle, instead of the placing the ball head there. Then you attach the ball head to the top of the center post. The post by itself (without ball head attached) is 8” long from mounting surface to mounting surface. But it has a twist collar, similar to the leg length adjustments, that allows it to grow to an extended length of 12¾”. When I first saw this, I said “WTF?” Seemed kind of strange.

Once I started using this tripod with a spotting scope, the utility of this unusual center post system started making sense. This brings all the adjustments needed while glassing close together near the scope. Height adjustment can be made with a quick twist. The ball head lockdown lever is right there as well. The eyepiece magnification twist adjustment and the scope focus knob are also nearby.

When you think about it, the ball head angle adjustment and the scope height adjustment are naturally related. Adjusting the angle up or down means that you might want to tweak the height since the height of the eyepiece has changed. Adjusting height with the telescoping twist lock can be performed with some precision while looking through the scope. I found that this is smoother and easier than adjusting height with a center post that rides up and down within the center of the leg triangle.

JB Weld repair made to the base of the center post

I did have one small quality problem with this tripod. The outer carbon fiber tube of the center post is threaded and glued to an aluminum collar which contains the female threads that mate with the post in the center of the leg triangle. Sam noticed that the center post was wobbling around over the course of the sheep hunt. When I examined the tripod after the hunt, I found that this joint was compromised. I was able to detach the post from the collar. Then I cleaned up the shallow threading in the carbon fiber, and the remnants of the factory glue on the threads of the aluminum collar. I then mixed up some good old JB Weld, screwed the pieces back together, and let them set. I’ve had no problems since. Of course Leupold’s lifetime guarantee would have taken care of it, but it was easier to fix it myself.

In use on the deer hunt, I had a minor issue which could have been easily addressed if I had the right tool with me. One leg was loose, so every time I picked up the glassing rig to reposition it, that leg would flop to a vertical position – it wouldn’t hold its angle like the other two properly tight legs would. It got frustrating. The tool I needed was a simple Allen wrench. The leg joints are fixed with Allen screws. Leupold includes two such Allen wrenches with the tripod, but they were back at home in the accessory compartment of the tripod’s zipper case that I had left at home. Of course.

Yes, the tripod comes with a nicely padded zip-up storage case, but I don’t use it for field carry. I just put the two pieces in the main cargo area of my backpack. The length of the collapsed leg section is 16-3/8”. I found a cloth bag that I put the center post and ball-head assembly in, to protect the carbon fiber legs from bumps and bruises from the metal ball head. The leg section weighs 25.6 oz. and the center post with ball head in the bag weighs 10.6 oz., for a total tripod packing weight of 36.2 oz. or 2 pounds, 4.2 oz.

Leupold Gold Ring Compact 15-30x50mm
Up to my recent purchase of the Leupold Gold Ring 15-30x50mm compact spotting scope, I owned two other spotters. The first is a hand-me-down from my wife’s grandpa, an older Leupold Gold Ring 12-40x60mm. I have no idea how old it is, at least 25 years old. But it is still, as then and now, a benchmark for Leupold optical quality. It comes with the form-fitting case that stays on the scope in-use. You just open up the front and rear openings to be able to see through the scope. With case and an Arca tripod adapter plate installed, it weighs 2 lb. 11.4 oz. (43.4 oz.).

The second spotting scope I own is an older angled-body Pentax PF-65EDA (65mm objective lens, Extra-low Dispersion glass, the A is for Angled). This scope uses interchangeable eyepieces. A zoom eyepiece is available, but I have only a 12mm fixed focal length eyepiece, model SMC XF-12, so magnification is fixed. When coupled with the 390mm focal length of the body, I get magnification of 390mm/12mm = 32.5x. I bought it off eBay before my sheep hunt because I went optics crazy. It also has a cover/case that can be left on in-use, but it is not as form-fitting as the Leupold case, so I usually take it out of the case to use it. The packable weight of this scope, in the case, with an Arca plate installed is 3 pounds exactly (48 ounces).

So a full-size spotting scope plus tripod adds 5 to 6 pounds of weight to your pack, maybe more depending on the tripod, when you are trying to climb mountains. No bueno.

When I recently discovered the Leupold 15-30x50 compact spotting scope, my immediate thought was that it was the perfect mate for the CF-425 Alpine tripod that I already owned, and could actually make carrying a spotting rig viable for me. Packable weight for the Leupold Compact 15-30x, in its case, with an Arca plate installed, is 1 lb. 10.4 oz. (26.4 oz.). Adding the Alpine tripod, this brings the weight of the total spotting rig to 62.6 oz. which is under 4 pounds at 3 lb. 14.6 oz. This lower packable weight was enough to tip the value scale in favor of adding it to my pack.

Actually, one could go even lighter by pairing this scope with a monopod instead of a tripod:

This particular little monopod, which comes with a rifle-rest fork which can be removed to reveal a 1/4-20 post, weighs only 6.3 oz. This would bring the spotting rig total weight to under 2 pounds, since I could delete the Arca plate.

Honestly though, the monopod gives you only slightly better stability than holding the scope in your hands. The big advantage of a tripod is being able to lock it down, then peer through the scope without your hands bouncing the image around. The monopod must always be held by at least one hand, imparting your human shake to the image.

Factory specs on this spotting scope are as follows:

Of course I recognized that when you go from a 60 or 65mm scope to a 50mm scope, you are going to be giving something up. You want a bigger scope to help you see small bullet holes in a target on the range, but that is not what you are looking for in the wild.

Sometimes the 8x32 binos are just not enough. Most of the time they are, but sometimes you need just a little more reach to see whether something you are looking at is just another bush, a shadow, a rock, or is it an animal?

At the low end, at 15x, that is almost twice the magnification of my binos. In most situations where I need more magnification than my binos can provide, that’s enough right there. Image quality is very good.

But with only a 50mm objective lens size, the image becomes noticeably dimmer as you tweak the magnification towards 30-power. You can still get a good clear focus, that’s not the problem. The darkening of the image is the problem. The exit pupil specs tell the story.

The diameter of the human pupil ranges in size from 2 to 5mm in daylight. At 15 power, this scope’s exit pupil is 3.3mm, yielding a decently bright image. At 30 power, the scope’s exit pupil is only 1.6mm, meaning that your eye wants to see more light than the scope is providing. As a reminder, exit pupil is calculated by taking the objective lens diameter and dividing by the magnification level.

User’s view of the scope

Early-use crash rash on the objective lens ring

But that is the tradeoff in choosing a compact spotter with only a 50mm objective lens. I knew that, and expected that the scope would mainly be useful at the lower end of the magnification range. And I deemed that good enough for my purposes of augmenting my main observation optic, the binoculars. Yet, you still have up to 30-power available.

The power knob is not indexed in any way. You can’t tell any particular intermediate power level between the stops at 15 power and 30 power. There are markings to tell you that counter-clockwise is lower in magnification, and that turning clockwise will increase magnification, but otherwise, you cannot tell when you are at 20 or 25 power.

There is considerable friction as you turn the eyepiece to change magnification levels. Sometimes you can feel a studdering (a made-up word between stutter and shudder) as you turn the knob. It is not an easy and fluid movement.

The action of the focus knob on the right side of the scope is rather abrupt. It takes very little movement to get from bad focus on one side of perfect, to bad focus on the other side. With that said, it is not hard to achieve the correct focus. There does not appear to be any noticeable backlash in the operation of the knob. It seems like getting the correct focus when you are close takes little more than putting turning pressure on the knob. You may not even notice that it moved, except that now the image is in focus.

Phone image of an opposing slope filled with shadows 1000 yards away at 15 power on the scope

As lightweight as the entire rig is, unfortunately it can be easily blown over by the wind if you are not paying attention. That happened to me twice with the scope suffering some early-use carnage (ow!). The first time, the scope landed on the edge of the objective lens housing. The rubber armor extends slightly past the metal there and absorbed some of the blow, but the threads on the scope for the metal lens cap did take a small amount of rash. Fortunately, I can still screw on the aluminum lens cover without trouble.

The second time, it landed on the edge of the plastic focus knob suffering some minor rash. I was able to smooth that out with a little light filing with a nail file.

Now if I am going to put the rig aside for a time, I spread the tripod legs out to a wider stance to give it much better wind stability. The tripod legs have three spread angle settings. The middle spread angle gives good stability.

The tripod also comes with a ring attached to the bottom of the leg triangle, and a mini carabiner intended to hook to that ring. This is so that you can hang something like a rock-filled sack below the center of the tripod for added stability. I haven’t tried that yet, but I guess that I need to.

Scope packed in its case measures 12½“ in length. With an Arca plate mounted on the scope for quick attachment to the tripod, it’s a bit of a tight fit squeezing it into the case.

It’s always hard to get a good image through an optic holding a phone in your hand behind an eyepiece, but the image above was my best result. It was impossible to get an image at 30x due to the tiny, tiny exit pupil. Maybe you can get a feeling for how much extra detail the spotting scope allows you to see that your naked eye or even the 8-power binos could ever see. Does anyone see a buck in that image that I missed?

Besides low weight, another bonus is low bulk of both the tripod and the compact scope. I’ve mentioned before that I already have a backpacker chair that goes into the main compartment of my hunting daypack. The chair, scope, and the two pieces of the tripod fit in the pack, even when I also have an MRE stuffed in there for my lunch.

So what’s the bottom line here? The Leupold website shows the Alpine CF-425 tripod on sale as I write this for $299, regularly $399. It also shows the Gold Ring 15-30x50mm Compact spotting scope for a price of $599. Strangely, these prices are lower than the prices you will find online at Amazon or Sportsman’s. I ordered the scope from Sportsman’s at a price of $699, though I ordered it at the time they were having their Leupold “Gold Event” days, where they give you $10 of gift card value for every $100 you spend on Leupold stuff. Plus I have their Explorewards credit card which gives me 5% credit back for items purchased at Sportsman’s Warehouse. So effectively I got a $105 discount from the $700 price. It’s listed on Amazon right now for the same $699.99 price.