BASICS: Mil versus Milrad

Yes, it's about angles again. In our last BASICS article, a small blur occurred. Namely the sentence: "Mil is the abbreviation for Milliradian, another unit for measuring angles, this unit is also called mil". That is not entirely correct and today we will correct it.

The abbreviation mil stands for Milliradian but it is also used as mrad. The unit mil is also referred to as mil, more precisely as the Artillery Mil or NATO-MIL. But how do Milliradian and mil differ?

It is about the definition of how many degrees the full angle, that is the complete circle, has. The full angle in milliradians is 2000π rad, calculated as 6283.19 rad, a very confusing number. For the mil, the full angle was defined as 6400 mil.

One Mil is approximately equal to 0.98175 milliradian (mrad) or 0.05625 degrees. Therefore, 1 mrad is slightly larger than 1 mil, to be precise about 1.8%, so 1 mrad = 1.02 mil. In the application for distance calculations, there is no change for small angles (up to 100 mil/mil or mrad) and the computational difference is negligible for our applications. So keep measuring those angles happily.

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