First off hello, I'm new to this board and new to "adult" airguns. I was a competitive airgunner 20+ years ago when I was a teenager and have recently become interested in shooting again.

Anyway to the topic, when shopping around for the guns available now-a-days I noticed that RWS seems to be the benchmark that everyone compares their other guns to, and I like the features of the RWS 48, BUT I notice that all their guns seem to have very short sight profiles. Now I understand the logic on a break barrel of having both sights on the same solid piece of metal, but why do the 48 and other Fixed barrel RWS guns have the rear sight so far forward?

BTW the gun I'm shopping for is my first "adult" airgun, I prize Quality and am looking for a general purpose gun to use for plinking, target practice and pest control. Input is welcome.

Hi there.
First - enjoy your old hobby, its great!
Second, a rear "notch" sight of the kind diana produces cannot be positioned close to the shooters eye since the focusing point- on target + on front blade + on rear notch ramp simultaneousely is impossible. At least one of hte three will be blurred and yop cannot fix your eye sharply on the desired point.
For this purpose, the best solution in mounting a rear aperture sihgt on the 11 mm rear rail.
Buying a good quality rear aperture is very expensive - can be up to ~400$ for a good German made (Anschutz / Feinwerkbau / Gheman / Steyr (Austrian made)). There are simpler apertures for about 40 - 60$.
Another adventage of the aperture is the longer sight spacing which may lead tobetter accuracy.
Disadvantage of the apertures is in afternoon poor light collection.
I guess Diana designs their rifles for hunting (which Im against in principal unless one must hunt for eating) so open notch sight suffers less from this.

One can often find top-quality sights used for very good prices, check Ebay, gun shows, your local trade paper, etc. I have picked up several for less than $100. Either Diana or Anschutz match sights will fit most Diana airguns.

You can easily solve the "problem" of low-light use of aperture sights simply by using differently-sized aperture disks, or better yet with an adjustable aperture. Peep sights are in fact MUCH better for low-light situations if the opening size is appropriate to the conditions.

With sporter match sights like the popular small Williams units, a popular trick for late-day shooting is simply to remove the aperture disk, and sight through its mounting hole! You can still shoot with remarkable precision that way.

Here's one of my favorite set-ups, a Weihrauch rifle with an old Anschutz sight and a Gehmann magnifying adjustable iris. I have less that $150 invested in these two accessories, and of course the iris can be instantly "transplanted" to any similar sight.

They do put the sights close together on the 48/52 guns and the reason I would say is the design of the gun. All they could do is put a rear sight on the scope mounting rail and I think that would put it too close to your eye. A aperture type set of sights are nice on airguns and I prefer them to the open sights. I own a HW77 also and the rear sight is at the front of the dovetail on it and though it had more sight radius I can't say it was really that much better than the open sights on the RWS fixed barrel 48/52 guns. Of course having a greater distance between front and rear sights is better.