Many airgun hunters spend as much, and often more, on quality rifles, optics, and kit in general, than their rimfire and centrefire counterparts. If this describes you, then take a look at my comprehensive night vision guide at gunmart.net. If, however, you are on a tighter budget, or simply prefer ‘just what I need’ to ‘the sky’s the limit’, read on, because this is for you!
By day, the effective hunting range of a good legal-limit PCP can be as much as 50m, but it is wise to set yourself tighter limits at night, as it is harder to range your target, and even harder to read the wind. All the same, you do want to be able to see a good bit further than you can shoot. 100m ought to be far enough to locate and identify your quarry and to plan your stalk. Enough preamble, let’s see what’s on offer.
Spotting your quarry
Day or night, it is always preferable to spot with a separate, hand-held device, rather than using your riflescope and sweeping the landscape with your muzzle in the process. I’ve picked both digital and thermal spotters here: two you hold at arm’s length and two you put to your eye. In the first category, is the new Nocturna Sentinel range by NiteSite. There are three models: standard, Pro and Ultra (£259.00, £359.00 and £459.00). At 50m, the claimed identification range (CIR) of the standard is probably too short, so go for the 100m rated Pro or Ultra and choose the latter if you want a recording facility. My other arm’s-length spotter is Seek’s Reveal Pro FF (£689.95). It has competition from Leupold’s LTO Tracker (£952) and FLIR’s Scout TK (£575) in the sub-£1K sector, though. Thus, the TK has the biggest LCD display (640 X 480) and the LTO has the fastest refresh rate (30 Hz). I even think the TK and LTO have better ergonomics. Nevertheless, the Reveal Pro has the biggest sensor (320x240) and this gives it a crucial edge when it comes to spotting small quarry at useful distances. You will get a bit more performance from Seek’s Compact Pro FF unit, which plugs into your smartphone and uses its much higher-resolution screen to display the thermal image, but check first that your phone is compatible (it must have a USB OTG port). Mine isn’t, so I’ve not yet been able to try the Compact Pro FF for myself. Remember too that your phone can be a crucial piece of emergency equipment, so keep a spare (charged!) battery handy. When it comes to performance, ignore the manufacturers’ claimed detection ranges (CDR) of 100’s of metres: they are clearly based on something considerably bigger and hotter than a bunny! Actual detection range (ADR) depends on factors such as ambient temperature, vegetation, and terrain, but as a rule of thumb I’d say the TK and LTO have an ADR of around 50m, whereas the Reveal Pro can add another 20m to that. This means all three devices fall short of my 100m benchmark, making them marginal for bunny-bashing, though they still have a role spotting squirrels in woodland, or finding shot game, which is what they were primarily designed for, after all. A further consideration is your eyesight. If you wear glasses, and don’t like to shoot with them on, it can be a nuisance having to dig them out each time you want to view the screen in your hand, in which case you’ll get on better with a device you hold to your eye. Which brings us to monoculars.
Monoculars
In this class, the best digital offering is currently Pulsar’s Digiforce 860VS (£234.95) or the WiFi enabled RT version (£329.95). This unit scores highly on ruggedness, ergonomics, controls, software, on-board IR, smartphone app (RT only) and product support, but ironically, at 6x/13x the magnification is really too high for the sensor to deal with, which, combined with the unit’s light weight, makes it hard to get the kind of clear, steady image a 3x/7.5x might give. Magnification sells, but sometimes at the cost of real performance. If you really want to crack the spotting issue, then, you should seriously consider Pulsar’s new Quantum Lite thermal monoculars. There are two models, the XQ23V and XQ30V, and both come in massively cheaper than previous Quantum devices (£1,199.95 and £1,299.95). Don’t be put off by the ‘Lite’ tag either: these are fully-featured units with a 17 μm, 384x288 px sensor, 640x480 px OLED Display 50hz frame rate, and a sensible magnification range of 1.8x to 7.2x or 2.5x-10x magnification. The price is kept down by a new flat lens design that uses less germanium yet gives a more even image. Having tested the XQ23V unit, I’d say it is everything you need.
Putting it in your crosshairs
There are still some excellent tubed NV units out there, such as the Pulsar’s Phantom and hybrid tubed/digital Argos, but digital offers more choice and lower prices across the board. First up are a couple of digital rear add-on options: the Atom (from £499.96) from Nightmaster and the Ward-D-Vision (£625.00), D-Mini (£350.00), or D-700 (£695.00) from Clive Ward at the Night Vision Store. Combined with a good illuminator and both companies can supply and advise on the best one to accompany your choice, any of these will give you the performance you need! An additional benefit of a rear add-on is that it leaves your regular riflescope -and its zero- in place for day-time use. The same is true of NiteSite’s system. Like the Atom and D-NV units, it places a low-light camera where your eye would be, but unlike them it locates the display in a separate module that also houses an array of IR LED illuminators. The final component is a choice of rechargeable Li-ion battery packs sized to go on your scope (2Ah), your buttstock (4Ah) or your belt (5.5Ah and 6Ah), depending how much run-time you need. The current range includes the airgunner-oriented Viper (£399.00) which is also available in an RTek variant (£599.00) featuring on-board recording and remote viewing via a WiFi connection to a dedicated app. The downsides of the NiteSite system are a unique head-up shooting position, the need for a bit of clever cable management, and less-thanrigid camera alignment, although a new aluminium mounting adaptor fixes this beautifully. As mentioned above, spectacle wearers may find it inconvenient to switch between near-eye and arm’s-reach displays, in which case I’d suggest complementing the NiteSite with the Nocturna Pro spotter. An alternative approach is to use a dedicated digital NV scope. A good Picatinny rail/mount system will let you switch between day and night scopes without losing zero, or you can dedicate a rifle to night work. The go-to choice in this category is Yukon’s impressively capable and affordable Photon series. The XT 4.6 X 42S (£399.95) or 6.5 X 50S (£419.95) is the place to start, but if a WiFi/app/streaming package appeals, then check out the new RT 4.5 X 42S (£549.95) and RT 6 X 50S (£599.95) models. All have capable, focusable and zeroable IR illuminators on-board, but for maximum performance you’ll want to boost these with an external unit. A very useful feature of the Photon is its built-in stadiametric rangefinder, which lets you measure the distance to your target (the ‘metric’ bit) by bracketing it between two horizontal lines (the “stadia” bit) based on a predetermined target height. Photons are hard to fault at night, but you wouldn’t choose one for daytime use. In fact, if you want an integrated day-night device there’s only one choice, and that’s the HD 3X-14X X-Sight II from ATN (£650), which offers a full-colour HD image by day, as well as a lower-resolution monochrome image by night, all delivered via a feature-rich, WiFi-enabled software/firmware package. The X-Sight offers stadiametric rangefinding too, but it can also interface via Bluetooth with ATN’s Laserballistics handheld laser rangefinder, combining either of these functions with automatic reticle adjustment. Yes, tell the X-Sight how far away your target is and it will ‘dial-in’ for you! More amazingly still, its built-in inclinometer and compass can factor-in the shooting angle and whatever wind value you enter, constantly monitoring where the rifle is pointing and correcting the point-of-aim accordingly. It will even record your shots automatically. The X-Sight II is heavier, thirstier on power and needs more external IR than the Photons, and ATN don’t yet have a record of reliability to set against Yukon/ Pulsar’s, but there can be little doubt that the X-sight II looks like the face of things to come! I’ll wrap up this overview of airgunoriented NV kit with one accessory and one ‘heads-up’. The accessory is NiteSite’s laser rangefinder (£249.00). Regular laser rangefinders are virtually impossible to aim at night, so NiteSite’s doesn’t have an eye-piece, just a simple text display with the range and menu settings. To aim, you simply look through the sight for the flicker of the IR laser beam, adjust this onto the target, and read off the range. At present, it is only available for NiteSite systems, but a Picatinny mount is under development, you’ll soon be able to reap its benefits with the NV aiming system of your choice. The ‘heads-up’ relates to a collaboration between Inteliscope, who offer a neat hardware/software solution for converting your mobile phone into a rifle sight, and Seek, who make the Compact Pro, a plug-in unit that converts your smartphone into surprisingly-capable thermal camera. Not yet available at the time of writing, it could well be the first affordable thermal weapon sight to offer the precision airgunners need. Exciting times! Most of this equipment can be found in your average gun shop, but a major retailer is Scott Country who do specialise in this area.
ATN Corp: www.atncorp.com (UK: ATN EU)
ATN EU: www.atneu.com 0203 7446303
Leupold: www.leupold.com
Viking Arms Ltd. www.vikingarms.com 01423 780810
Night Vision Store (Ward Optical Systems): www.nightvisionstore.co.uk 01233 635378
Nightmaster: www.nightmaster.co.uk 01535 611688
NiteSite: www.nitesite.com 01759 377235
Nocturna: http://nocturna.co.uk 03300 057 878
Pulsar: www.pulsar-nv.com (UK: Thomas Jacks Ltd)
Thomas Jacks Ltd: www.thomasjacks.co.uk 01789 264100
Yukon Optics: yukonopticsglobal.com (UK Thomas Jacks Ltd)
Scott Country, 01556 503587; www.scottcountry.co.uk
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