I’ve been interested in nightvision since my army days, now, they do have some kit there don’t they. Anyway, I realised that some sort of NV is needed when the rats started nickin the bird food under cover of darkness.
My first attempt, several years ago, was bolting one of those monocular things from Aldi’s on top of a cheap co2 rifle. This actually turned out to be a very productive gun. Aiming was simply done by ‘remembering’ where the pellet landed, which was not a problem really as the grainy image and lines on the screen made it easy to keep track.
Next, about three years ago, I acquired an ATN Paladin,
which is a cracking bit of kit for the task. The difficulty here is the weight of the thing, and what ‘Some Bloke’ calls the ‘poked-eye-syndrome’, making extended use quite difficult. Another problem with this approach was the long mounting rail which means I had to find a rifle that did not have a high magazine in the way. No easy task, just look at the rifles available. The only one I found was a BSA Scorpion. This has it’s own problems of a spring loaded magazine that is very hard to get pellets in, neigh, impossible, in the dark.
Next up was duct-taping a camera on the back of a scope. This made the scope so long that the rifle became very hard to hold so another rifle had to be found. Galloping in for the rescue came the Evanix Rainstorm bullpup,
which has a rail the whole length of the rifle, allowing me to set the rig right forwards.
This was fine for a long time.
The only downside to this was the rats had become sensitive to 850nm light, and using a scope means not enough light from 940nm to create an image.
My first solution was to put IR lights up on the walls, left on all night, so that the pests would get accustomed to the light, and that approach has worked a treat, except, and there is always a but, I can’t get to those who skirt the edges and run in and out for a nosh.
So, ‘scopeless’ was the next venture.
This first one I mounted an adjustable zoom lens, which worked fine, but had no sign of the supposed OSD, in spite of numerous promises from the seller
I tried marking the screen with blobs of dark liquid plastic, which was partially successful, but obviously not possible to move about.
Eventually I gave up on that.
This has been, not so much a learning curve, as a frustrating tedious plod through all of the shysters that market their goods from that well known place named after fragile cups and saucers. Out of seven cameras that had OSD the number that really actually had OSD equalled a tad under zero
My relentless search finally unearthed a UK firm, known on here as Splatty, who was able to supply a brilliant camera that does all thing for all people,
and would probably fry eggs as well if I could find that function in the, finally, big fanfare, true OSD.
As I said to Splatty I think I will rename this year as the ‘Chinese year of the porky’.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, Oh! no, it’s already been a long story. Sorry!!!
Here’s the latest.
I Mounted the camera inside a piece of old plastic 3/4“ water pipe, that is a tight fit on the inside and perfect for 1“ scope mounts on the outside. Two velcro mounts hold the 940nm torch tight. The plastic pipe just grips the lens tight enough so that I can give it a bit of a tweak for day/night shift. A couple of shims got the zero close, and then the privacy reticule for minor corrections.
Battery sits in a Molle pouch that allows the battery switch to just poke out the top,
DVR and leads fit nicely in the center part. I know this is all old hat to you peeps so I’ll spare the blow by blow account of all the bits and bobs.
It's not perfect yet but with a bit of input from here I think I might just crack the nut.
Oh, and I got the heads up on this site from Splatties site, so thanks for having me aboard, and I look forward to finally learning where I‘ve been going wrong all this time
I just wished I'd found this earlier to save me a whole heap of hurt 
Nev.
