BSA 4-16x40 Contender, Am I Missing Something Here?

[patobravo]

I just purchased a 4-16x40 Contender Mil-Dot scope from a local gun shop. No where in the documentation can I find at what magnification setting the Mil reticle is designed for. So I get out my 100' tape measure and 13 year old son and we measure the distance from our front yard to the garage door of a neighbor's house at the end of the street, with a little tweaking of our start point the 15.5' wide garage door is now known to be 1500' from a certain point in the front yard. I believe this should be 10.3 mils in the reticle so I sight on the garage door and adjust the magnification until the width of the door fills ~ 10.3 spaces on the reticle, this turns out to be the 10x magnification setting (more specifically, where the the magnification index pointer lines up with the inside edge of the left hand side of the zero where "10" is engraved.

So my question- is this something I'm supposed to just know, that variable magnification scopes using Mil-Dot reticles are calibrated at a magnification of 10 or a glaring omission from BSA in their documentation?

[Iloveguns]

Most scopes are set at Max magnification. But not all. Im surprised none of the paper work does not tell you. Seems like you have it all figured out though.

[patobravo]

Most scopes are set at Max magnification. But not all. Im surprised none of the paper work does not tell you. Seems like you have it all figured out though.

Yeah, I searched all over- manual, box, I found nothing though. It's a budget scope and I suspect aimed at folks who maybe want to say they have a Mil-Dot scope but never intend to use it for range finding, at least that's the message BSA is sending me with their glaring omission of that pertinent little nugget of info. Either that or I'm blind but I've been all over that manual. And BTW, the magnification engraved on the scope is all filled in the same color (white) so no color indicating which to use for range finding.