Joe here from North East England although I do feel about 10 years late to the party
I'm new to NV although I have an old NiteSite Viper which I use for rabbits and rats however I recently acquired a second hand HTH-731 Gen 2+. I've been using it on a semi auto 22LR on rabbits out to 80 yards with a low power LED lamp for eyeshine and I'm very happy with it. I know very little about the model so if anyone knows anything about them it would be good to know. I believe its Russian but don't know what tube it uses or if they can easily be swapped out if ever I wanted to upgrade it.
I've been doing a bit of experimenting with eyepiece filters and found that an astronomical UHC filter removes virtually all the scintillation and also does a very good job of preserving the eyes night vision,there's a bit of dulling and a lingering red cast but it's no where as near as blinding as the unfiltered view and doesn't leave that unbalanced feeling. It does dim the image and give a blue cast but I much prefer it to the original green.
Also I watched a Youtube channel where it was said leaving a tubed device on for say 30 hours in complete dark "resets" the microchannel plate refreshing any burned areas but I can't find any other references so I don't know if there's anything in it. I'm reluctant to try ,I only paid £300 for the unit and wouldn't want to try replacing it with the cost of new ones!
I've found it very hard to get decent pictures through the eyepiece but this gives an idea, in reality it's all a bit sharper.
