Bear with me....
My night vision sucks, and I mean S-U-C-K-S. I had contemplated using my FLIR Zeus on a crossbow in the past for this reason, but never got best the "huh, that would be neat" stage of the thought process because my thermal has no reticle to account for drop (let alone arrow drop).
Moving forward, my wife went a bit overboard on my birthday since I lost my hunting farm and was trying to cheer me up a bit - so I have upgraded by Stryker Katana 360 (more like 340fps) to a Ravin R29X. When I was going through the manual I saw that one of the primary differences in paying for the sniper model is a "jackplate" that seems to be intended to allow the mounting of LPVO type scopes (it looks like the most popular option there is to go with the Sig BDX line - which is a thought all on its own, but it doesn't address my poor nightvision).
There is the ever present concern with thermal of target identification (you get an outline, but not an in-living-color image). I'm not concerned with this as: a) I positive ID through binoculars; and b) my Zeus gives me a damned good outline.
My bigger concern is I'm not shooting a bullet, but an arrow [yes, that is what Ravin calls them, not bolts]. And my thermal won't tell me if there are a thin branch [or dozens of them] in the way. To be fair, my old school xbow scope doesn't necessarily do that either; I've had a couple times in the past where the bolt has been deflected by a branch I didn't realize was in the flight path.
I have hunted gun season with my thermal for two years now and for those few weeks it makes my life much less frustrating at dawn minus/dusk plus thirty. But archery and muzzleloader my eyes have had to "go it alone" (and still will during muzzleloader - I'm not risking the recoil of my Savage ML10 with something no longer available for sale to the public). Seeing as I do most of my hunting in archery, I'd love to take a little more frustration out of it....
So, has anyone tried this? Other concerns I'm not thinking of? Other suggestions to address poor night vision?
My night vision sucks, and I mean S-U-C-K-S. I had contemplated using my FLIR Zeus on a crossbow in the past for this reason, but never got best the "huh, that would be neat" stage of the thought process because my thermal has no reticle to account for drop (let alone arrow drop).
Moving forward, my wife went a bit overboard on my birthday since I lost my hunting farm and was trying to cheer me up a bit - so I have upgraded by Stryker Katana 360 (more like 340fps) to a Ravin R29X. When I was going through the manual I saw that one of the primary differences in paying for the sniper model is a "jackplate" that seems to be intended to allow the mounting of LPVO type scopes (it looks like the most popular option there is to go with the Sig BDX line - which is a thought all on its own, but it doesn't address my poor nightvision).
There is the ever present concern with thermal of target identification (you get an outline, but not an in-living-color image). I'm not concerned with this as: a) I positive ID through binoculars; and b) my Zeus gives me a damned good outline.
My bigger concern is I'm not shooting a bullet, but an arrow [yes, that is what Ravin calls them, not bolts]. And my thermal won't tell me if there are a thin branch [or dozens of them] in the way. To be fair, my old school xbow scope doesn't necessarily do that either; I've had a couple times in the past where the bolt has been deflected by a branch I didn't realize was in the flight path.
I have hunted gun season with my thermal for two years now and for those few weeks it makes my life much less frustrating at dawn minus/dusk plus thirty. But archery and muzzleloader my eyes have had to "go it alone" (and still will during muzzleloader - I'm not risking the recoil of my Savage ML10 with something no longer available for sale to the public). Seeing as I do most of my hunting in archery, I'd love to take a little more frustration out of it....
So, has anyone tried this? Other concerns I'm not thinking of? Other suggestions to address poor night vision?