The Pitch Black Field Master (PBFM) is a complete camerabased hunting system with day and night capability and a price tag of just £385. A development of the original PB Hunter, the most obvious change is that the Field Master wears its illumination on the outside, a pair of LED flashlights (one IR, one white light) being mounted in scope rings to Picatinny rails on the R/H side of the housing, which is consequently lighter and more compact.

Other things remain much the same. There’s a fixed-focus 5x lens at the front with a colossal depth-of-field (15ft to infinity), a big 4.3-inch foldout, full-colour screen on the L/H side (with brightness, contrast and saturation controls on the back), switches and ports at the rear (ON/OFF, a 4-way menu control, video out and charger), a 2-inch long dovetail mount underneath, and a hard-anodised housing with lots of clever stuff inside, including a rechargeable and lightweight LiPoly battery with a run time of 12 hours and a charge time of two hours. The 4-way ‘joystick’ lets you access and select a wide range of menu functions, most of which you will never use.

Design

Having built the first version for his own use, the system’s creator, Nic Wenham, soon found himself making units for friends, and before long things had acquired a momentum that convinced him to go commercial. Nic originally used standard components (though he now has several key parts built to his own uprated specifications). Thus the control board comes from a zone-able motion-sensitive security camera which lets the user define the active sensing area by overlaying up to eight straight lines on the image with single-pixel precision. The PB system cleverly repurposes this by de-activating the motion sensor and deploying the lines to create a zero-able reticle.

Clever indeed, but it does mean that each line has to be individually set (they can’t be made to move in synch) and the setting bars are three levels down in the menu, as is the selector for the eight available colours (black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, cyan and pink).

Mounting the sight is simple enough if you have a straight run of 9.5mm-11.5mm dovetails on the receiver of your air-rifle, rimfire, or small-calibre centrefire (.17HH to .223Rem). If you don’t, you’ll need to buy two Sportsmatch AB3 dovetail risers, or two RB4 or RB6 adapters to get the job done. (Tip #1: fit them with the screws facing right to minimise cant. Tip #2: don’t mount the PBFM to a spring or gas-ram airgun as the recoil is too harsh.)
To zero, first place a target on a large backer sited 25 metres away in front of a safe backstop. Then create an aiming mark (I selected line three, scrolling down and right until I had a 1x1 pixel square near the middle of the screen), settle the rifle in a rest, load, aim and shoot.
You probably won’t be able to see the point-of-impact (POI), so unload, go forward and mark it with a pen or sticker. Back at the rifle, scroll out the vertical side of the square aiming mark nearest the POI until it aligns with it (keeping the other side in the centre of the target). Then do the same with the top or bottom. Finally, scroll the remaining two sides away from the original target to create a 1x1 pixel square over the POI. You can now use lines one and two to overlay a conventional pair of horizontal and vertical crosshairs, one or more pixels thick, over the zero indicated by line three.

Scroll On

At this point you can either scroll line three away out of sight, or use it to designate a pitch black | product test secondary shorter/longer-range zero. (Tip #3: keep the lines in a numerical sequence that’s easy to remember. Tip #4: copy down the co-ordinates of your zeroed lines from the menu screen for future reference. Tip #5: to simplify adjustment, don’t overcomplicate the reticle. Tip #6: Consider setting up the remaining lines as measuring stadia in the corner of the image to help range-find your quarry. Tip #7: 1 pixel = about 1 cm @ 25 metres).
How fine or coarse you make your reticle will depend on how big/close you expect your target to be and how good your short-range eyesight is. Tip #8: If you wear reading glasses you will need them, because, unlike a conventional optic, the Field Master has no dioptre adjustment.

As the system is camerabased, it is safe to use it in daylight. When the available light falls below a user-determined threshold, it switches automatically from colour to B/W. This affects the reticle too, but you can keep your colour reticle in the dark by selecting ‘colour’ instead of ‘auto’ in the menu. The trade-off is that you lose the higher 720VTL resolution that gives enhanced depth perception at night.

Before I went after live quarry, I familiarised myself with the camera in both daylight and at night, working out the ranges at which I could reliably put rounds into the kill zone. Using my .177, 12FPE Daystate Air Wolf, I was after small quarry (rats and rabbits) and correspondingly small groups. My maximum range with the PB Field Master was 35 metres. On foxes, even with a centrefire, I’d have been most comfortable inside 100 metres (YMMV). This was in no way due to poor low-light performance. It’s true that without illumination the Field Master is pretty much blind in the dark, but turn on the IR and you get a beautifully even image with excellent contrast, and impressive detection/ identification ranges of around 250/175 metres respectively at full power. The wide field of view trumps conventional NV devices too, and makes the Field Master worth the money for its spotting capabilities alone.

The Field Master’s 5x magnification is fine. What limits the range is the distance to the screen (around 30cm), which effectively shrinks the image. Eye-shine from your quarry does help with reticle placement at night, but as ranges increase aiming starts to feel like threading a needle. You also have to adjust physically to the Field Master. Looking a few degrees to the side of where the rifle is pointing takes some getting used to. As a result, I preferred using the Field Master from a rest, either shooting rabbits from the 4x4 or sitting still to ambush rats. Nevertheless when used like this it was both highly effective – it accounted for 16 rats on its first outing – and great fun.

Pluses and minuses

The minus points first: an unconventional shooting position with an offset target image; a bright screen that casts a glow on the user’s face (though in testing this was not found to spook quarry), a press-fit lens cover that’s easily lost; a highprofile that accentuates the effect of cant and may require a new gun slip; relatively coarse reticle adjustments; greater difficulty in achieving precise shot placement as target size decreases relative to reticle size than with conventional ‘eyepiece’ systems.
Plus points: an immense field of view; an even and well-defined image; illuminators that reach out further with less power due to optimisation for IR; a custom reticle that can be zeroed with just one shot; a rugged build that withstands recoil cartridge rifles up to .223; and daylight capability.

The Field Master also enables a third party to observe/confirm the scene/ shot live; and if it ever needs repairing Nic stands firmly behind his product, providing genuine no-quibble support and offering spare parts at impressively low prices. The modest £385 asking price obviously makes the PB Field Master perfect for those on a budget, but don’t assume this means entrylevel performance. Indeed the most amazing thing about the Pitch Black Field Master is that I can’t think of a better NV spotting device at any price, short of going to thermal.

Nic also informed me he has a laser rangefinder add-on in the works that will use lines on the Field Master’s screen for both aiming and display! Due in spring 2015, it should give the already unique Pitch Black system a fresh advantage over the competition. GM T: 01788 891935 or 07899 926552 www.pitchblacknightvision.co.uk

PRICE: £385

SUPPLIED ACCESSORIES:
Osram Olson Black T20 focusable IR flashlight with three intensity levels, c/w charger, remote switch and two sets of batteries. 1000 Lumen, focusable visible spectrum flashlight with two intensity levels and a strobe mode, c/w charger, remote switch and two sets of batteries.