We investigate the scattering of the radiation from an acoustic point source by a solid, elastic prolate spheroid at a variety of transducer–scatterer separations. We find that the most important effect, when contrasted to the plane‐wave limit, is an increase in scattering strength (with decreasing transducer–scatterer separation) associated with the 1/rvariation of the incident field and the finite size of the scatterer. We use the results of this investigation to formulate a rough criterion for establishing the farfield region in scale model scattering experiments in the low‐frequency region.