Bagged another nice meat hog with the FLIR T-50 Thermal last night.

We had hiked through the woods about 3 miles or so with plenty of sign on a 1/4 Moon with no clouds and total stars out, the PVS-14s did a great job of allowing us to roam around in the moonlight underneath a hardwood hammock canopy.

Picked up this meat hog with the PVS-14 about 150 feet off the trail and my friend (SpeedQuest) would have to transition his PVS-14 from his helmet to behind his NV Eotech so I gave him my rifle and told him to take it out with the FLIP T50.

One handloaded Barnes 70gr TSX through the neck spine and he did not even twitch, DRT!  :grin:

I am really enjoying the DBAL-D2 with the IR laser and IR Illuminator for super fast targeting and shooting with the FLIR thermal for backup and/or longer range targeting, performs like a dream!

We did not set up on any of our stands for more than ten or so minutes as it was such a beautiful night out with clear high pressure it was more fun walking, NV and Thermal gear performed flawlessly.

Hey SkyPup can you tell me if your FLIR T50 has a visible serial number and a date of manfact on the body of the scope?

Yes it does, it is prominently displayed on the rear of the unit right above the ocular lens, it has three different serial numbers on it and a scanner holographic code, but it does not have the build date.

The FLIR T-50s were produced at FLIR's Portland, Oregon plant beginning in 2009 under contract with Truijicon as Truijicon is responsible for the marketing and sales of the unit worldwide under contract with FLIR.

SkyPup...

Thanks for the 30 second loan on the Thermal Device!  It's always a blast when we hang out.  

Boss, you missed out on the hunt tonight!

Nailed this nice 200 pound boar with the FLIR T-50 Thermal @ 80 yards with one Barnes 70 grain TSX to the head, DRT:

Now that the temperature is dropping after a LONG HOT summer, the FLIR T-50 is working 100% better allowing me much more long range and precise shots to the head, and not destroying any meat!

The thermals all work much better when it cools off (including the PS-32) and there is a greater temperature differential between the ambient environment and the target.

You Sir are a one man killing machine!
Based on what I have seen here the hog population in Florida might be close to extinction.
When that happens you can make your way west to Texas as I am sure they could use your help

We know what's on the table at Skypup's house - pork chops, centerloin, bacon, sausage, etc. etc.  

LOL, the thermals are working 100% better now that the ambient night temperatures have fallen into the 40's & 50's instead of the 80's & 90's, making for some easy head shots at ranges out to 250 yards with my rig. I normally sneak up on them and try to get them within 100 yards to simplify things, but nail them accurately out past 200 yards if need be.

Simply an outstanding instrument for the destruction of vermin at night!

There just is NO escaping the damn thermals now!

I agree, I use my thermals for scanning up north and NOTHING is better than a chilly night for spotting critters that think they are operating with impunity in the darkness .  The trick is for it to be just chilly enough for the thermal to work optimally while not being so cold that my buddies and I want to constantly sneak back inside to the heat and the beer.

Okay, here is a good story....

I have been after this pair of coyotes for almost three weeks now and have had them in my sights at night three times, each time they were too far off and I held off on pulling the trigger.

The third time was last night.

The moon was out full and very bright clear night with 10-15mph cold wind in the upper 40's coming from the west so they could not smell me.

I was out taking my dogs for a walk at sundown and hear a group of coyotes yelping and carrying on less than 1/4 mile out behind my home. Got my rifle and FoxPro Prairie Blaster and SP-55 speaker and setup right after it got dark out. Called with Female Coyote Invitation and Whitetail Fawn Distress for 30 minutes, no action.

Took a one hour break and came back out at 9PM and did same, no go.

Came out again at 10PM and no show.

Time to go to bed @ 11:00PM, so told the wife I would go out with the NV Helmet and PS-32 and check for coyote action and when I came back in I would take the dogs out before bed.

As soon as I stepped off the carport I saw two 'yotes out on the hog offal. Slowly sneaked down to within 175 yards and setup the FLIR T-50 Thermal on my rifle and immediately had the two dogs in my crosshairs, they were 200 yards out. Wanted to bring them in closer for the kill, so tweaked my mouth call rabbit distress softly and they both immediately turned and started walking in to me. Was squeezing the trigger with a dog in the crosshairs with BIG PLANS of a double in my mind's eye.

Suddenly all the flood-lamps on the house come on and out comes my wife with the dogs yelling and barking out to my stand, coyotes turn and run.....

Ah Wah, it was a complete and total BUST,but they will be back and I will still continue hunting them....






Was able to "unbust" myself tonight right after dinner about 8:30PM when this song dog came into Bay Bee CottonTail and nailed him @ 200 yards with a Barnes 70gr TSX handload.

It pays to be persistent!!!!





FLIR THERMALS RULE!!!

Can you get a picture of the reticles if offers?

When I got home from work, a Male Bald Eagle was eating my coyote!

I guess dinner was on you tonight

We have an eagle nest on the property with a huge adult female, an adult male, and a juvenile male.

This kinda looks like the juvenile male as he is just beginning to have some white tail feathers.

I am hoping when I get the game cam photos off the oak tree camera that I have some great close-ups of him feeding, will see tomorrow....maybe the entire family will show up tomorrow?

My 13 year quest to obtain thermal has come to an end. It started when I met Ron Witherspoon at the old Hiram Maxim MG shot up in Maine so many years ago and it has continued to this day.  
I have always wanted a helmet mounted thermal unit but you guys proved useless in my thread about thermal monoculars so I had to go a different direction.

I want to extend a sincere thank you to "RustedAce" who started the T-50 thread.
RustedAce helped me out earlier tonight with some critical information. Without his guidanace I would have been starring at this thing without
a clue of what to do. Thank you again Sir!!!

I also want to thank SkyPup for all of his great contributions to this thread. That guy rains death upon everything he sees. We have no hogs to hunt in NY, just fat women, but we have plenty of yotes and foxes.

Oh by the way I also wanted to say that I hate RustedAce for starting this thread and SkyPup for all his kill pictures and vids as  my piggy bank is now busted, busted and busted.
I now have no money to give to Vic for the long awaited Mini WASP

I am currently stuck in the burbs of Long Island babysitting my 6 year old nephew while house sitting. Thankfully we have electric so I can type this, but I have no gas in the car so I am housebound. There is not a drop to be found anywhere. The up side is I now have a new toy to occupy my time while I am being held against my will. Given my new duties in this god forsaken place that is devoid of wildlife I will not be sharing any kill pictures for sometime. The neighbors cat however is looking like a potential target as I think he killed the sole backyard cottontail we had roaming around.

I still cannot figure out how to get the internal reticles to come up and I keep hitting sometype of picture capture button thing (I have not a clue)
The Aimpoint is all I have for this thing right now and it is sitting to low so I have to get a higher mount. The other option is to move it further forward to get it off the GG&G extended rail which would drop it down and in alignment with the Comp M.

Outside of the fact that I really have no clue about how to operate this thing it is still so F'ing cool. To see a neighbor pull up in the car with the glow of the engine and the brakes. To see the neighbor raising a cig to her mouth across the street is to cool. Sadly it is true that they cannot see through glass or I would be outside right now checking out the neighbors hot wife as she gets ready for bed.

Thanks again for the call and help RustedAce!

Now that I have this I am secretly hoping that we lose power.  
   

No problem, happy to help.

Ill post pictures of the quick reference manual card that came with mine that has all the info on what to press tommora.

All right! That is one fine instrument and it is 100% FLIR inside and out.

You will love that thing once you get out of suburbia with it and into the woods, the coyotes are NOT going to appreciate this at all.

It will take awhile to get the hang of how to use it properly under different conditions.

The nice thing about the T-50 is that you can manually adjust it to suit a wide variety of environmental conditions.

Hope that everyone recovers from Sandy soon and the place gets cleaned up, I am sure there is allot of work to do to get back to normal.

When Hurricane Charles and Jean both went over us we were without power for seven days the first one and two weeks the second one, all in one month.

It took allot of seat time in the tractor just to cut a path out to the road and God knows how many tanks of chainsaw gas clearing things out.

Will be looking forward to your comments once you use it out in the woods on some song dogs and foxes, it doesn't get much better than that. you will enjoy every minute of it!

Damn, I could be out hunting, but I'll take a minute to type in the reticule instructions:

Press Display and NUC to enter Reticule Mode. An "R" icon appears in the left-center of the display.

Adjustments may be made while the "R" icon remains in the display.

Press EZoom and Auto at the same time to change Reticule Types.

The ACTS will automatically exit this mode if nothing is done in 10 seconds.

Press Display (left), Auto (Right), NUC (Up), and POL (Down) to move Reticule.

One of the cycled reticule modes displays No Reticle, both the type and position of the reticule are saved and restored on power up.


Reticule Types:

1.) No Reticule

2.) Cross Reticule 1 (2 Segments)

3.) Cross Reticule 2 (4 Segments)

4. Browning M2 50 Caliber Machine Gun Operator Reticule with Chevron

Now I can go back out hunting....

Sadly no reticles are coming up for me.
Thanks for the directions. I will try again.

I think I missed out on two coyotes lending a hand on the reticules, two 'yotes were too far out for me to take them when I went out in the backyard.

I'll get them later on this week....

Here you go CM1

Very much appreciated.
Thanks again

Thats a disappointment.  One of my complaints about the Thermal I have used is that its has only the most basic duplex like reticle.  I really had hoped that Trijicon would have stuffed a TA01NSN like reticle as an option in their thermal.

Both the T-50 and the T-60 are specifically designed to interface with an ACOG.

You can use the T-50 standalone reticules without an exterior optic if you want to.

The T-60 has NO reticule at all and must use an external optic for sighting.

Here is the T-50 dual reticule with my Eotech 552NV reticule as seen though the Eotech (this will not show on the video output from the T-50) as this is a photo taken behind the Eotech:



and the inverse:



It really works great with the Eotech painting coyotes with ketchup.

SkyPup I had seen those pictures previously and the combo of the two reticles really stands out.
I myself will most likely just use a rear mounted optic, most likely my Aimpoint CompM or a scope of some sort, perhaps the Aurora 8010 I just picked up.
That would make going from day to NV to thermal so easy but the weight might be an issue.

My biggest concern now is no matter what I have tried I cannot get the internal reticles to come on. I have been in the yard on and off all day trying.
The rerference card that RustedAce put up clearly explains how to que up the reticles. SkyPup you also wrote about how to que up the reticles but nothing.
Given they are not coming up and I am confident that I am doing it correctly I need to make sure that this T50 scope is not defective or that it does not have a simple software issue that is not allowing
the reticles to come up.

I was emailed another reference card that does not show anything about reticles.  

I reached out to a well know NV company that has helped me out in the past when I had some issues with a NV scope. The head guy there flat out told me that
the FLIR T50 Thermosight does not have internal reticles. I explained that I have been in contact with people that have them and they say that they have internal reticles. I further conveyed to him that someone provided me a reference card that depicts how to que them up. He said that he does not care what anyone has told me and again said that the T50 does not have internal reticles. He even said he was not confusing the T50 and the T60.

I beleive what you guys are telling me here as you guys have actual experience with them and I believe what I have read so I am just scratching my head, soon to be banging my head against some solid surface.

The directions for the internal reticules work just fine on mine, however I gave up messing with the manual temperature gradient adjustments and had to resort to using the AUTO function to get things back to normal once I screwed them up?

It works really good in it's normal mode and me messing with the gradients did not improve anything and more often degraded the image response.

I am not sure where it actually develops the temperature gradient from, ie in the center or the entire FOV, whatever I could not improve on its standard response settings.

The reticules, however, work just fine straight away.

The expert that told you they do not exist is wrong, I have seen all four of them myself on my unit.

Yeah mine pop up fine as well.

Update the reticle saga is over and my unit is in fact operating properly.

Turns out that the NV rep is both correct and incorrect. FLIR conveyed that some models do not have the reticle option, period.
Some models were specifically made to work with a day optic only, such as the ACOG. They said this
negates any software issues and alignment issues. This is the model I have. Based on how I believe I will use the unit
I do not see this as an issue. I am just glad to know that it is not defective.

Just one more ? and then I promise I will head into the abyss.

Where to get the RS video cable. I did a google yesterday but it did not go well.  

Thanks again for the help guys.

Does yours have a visible red or IR laser?

Mine does not.

One other tip is that I ground off the two magnesium points on the ON-OFF switch with a Dremel Carbide grinder very slowly and carefully to smooth those off.

They kept catching on my clothes while we were hiking out to our stands and turning on the unit and wearing the batteries down. That is no longer a problem....

As for the ACOG, I believe it is a perfect match to this unit (mine had included with it a small plastic ACOG objective insert and rubber boot to connect over the T-50 ocular lens).

The ACOG is short, light, rugged, self contained, always ready to use, and works like a charm with minimalistic attention compared to other available optics.

I have two of the TA02 LED units, normally I leave the lighted reticule off when using the T-50 as the black reticule matches the white thermal image perfectly.

I have no idea where to get the military designed RS-170 connector for the T-50 unit, I looked virtually everywhere for it and have not seen one.

It takes a specific small coaxial input cable connector and has a BNC connector on the other end that you can interface with a RCA connector for use with a portable DVR unit.

The input connector is what I have no idea about, if you can get that somewhere please be sure to let me know...

All the T-50s are made in FLIR's Portland, Oregon manufacturing plant.

I got mine from Victor @ TNVC so you could ask him about it but I bet it will be expensive as it is an obscure military design....

I would love to get a six inch video cable for it as that is all I need, the one I have is three feet long and I wrap that around the unit and mount the digital DVR on the rail in front of the T-50 under the objective lens. That is a mess for hiking but works well once on the stand.

Vic, do you know where to get a short cable for this unit???

Red laser on mine.

I will keep an eye out for the clothes catching and powering up the unit, but I cringe at the thought of modifying
anything that costs over two bits.

Outside of looking through a couple of ACOG's I have zero experience with them but we will see what happens in the distant future.

Right now the fun fund has been drained so the belt needs to be tightened as I need to build it back up as a Mini WASP Clip On needs to be part of my gear.
Depending on how bad and how soon I want/need it I might part with a few NV items to get there.

The good news is that word has come down from the boss that on the morning of Nov 13th I will be released from my house sitting/babysitting/GC duties here on Long Island. As such I will be free to head home and roam the Catskill Mountains of upstate NY and kill stuff.
My plan however hinges on one tiny detail, that I have gasoline to get far enough upstate that I can find more easily. Hey Gov Cuomo how about some gas

Hey, fellow TA50 users, a little trick I figured out trying to get rid of light spill between units, if you check out in between my TA50 and TA31 in that pic, I am using one of these:

http://tnvc.com/shop/pvs-14-shuttered-eye-guard/

When you push it in place it opens up, and minimizes the light getting out between them alot better.

I know its a little thing, but it always bugged me.

Hey SkyPup a little confused (yes again )  regarding the video cable. Are you using the factory supplied cable depicted as part of the accessory kit (see pic below) but with that specific adapter that you showed a link to earlier in this thread so it works with your DVR?.


I see the company below offers their own cable for the W1000 for DVR connection, but am not sure that it will work with the T-50. It looks pretty long in their picture but if it does work perhaps it could be   custom cut for a specific length. I am in need of a cable myself.



Edit I guess AR15.com blocks links to this company or some other problem is precluding the link. In any even they were selling the W1000's and are from CO.

Yes, that is the required cable in that photo of the exact kit that I got from TNVC!

When I purchased my FLIR T-50 that is the specific kit that I received from Vic.

Whatever cable that Raytheon W1000 uses I am sure that it will NOT fit the FLIR.

Believe it or not, the FLIR T-60 takes a different cable connector too and does not interchange with the T-50, you'd think the people (FLIR-Truijicon-DOD) would have made them use the SAME cable and connections???.

RustedAce, in the photo above is the ACOG plastic insert and rubber cup that you put into the objective opening of the ACOG and then attach the T-50 ocular lens to the ACOG objective lens covering the entire connection and eliminating any light emission while using the unit, keeping yourself totally in the dark and unintrusive.

You can see the plastic insert installed on the T-50 -> ACOG here:

After dinner tonight I went out around 8:00PM and called for about 30 minutes using BayBee Cottontail and Female Invitation on my FoxPro Prairie Blaster, after around 30 minutes I gave it up to head back to the house for a warm cup of coffee as it is in the 40's out tonight.

As soon as I turned around I immediately spotted a coyote standing directly behind be about 50 feet, he took off running and I watched him got into the horse pasture down where the horses were eating their hay.

Came back in a got a cup of coffee and went back out thirty minutes later, as soon as I sat down and turned on the Prairie Blaster, within 30 seconds this coyote came out of the woods about 250 yards out and I waited until he got to 125 yards out to pull the trigger -> clean miss????

Well, I should have better luck next time, maybe later on tonight......

Here is the thermal video of my fantastic miss (5MB WMV):

http://www.phossil.com/thom/Night%20Vision/FLIR%20T50/Missed%20Coyote/Missed%20Coyote.wmv

FLIR T-50 Feeds Eagles:

Close Up of the Supreme Predator consuming a Predator...

Vic,
How about some thermal in the Christmas stocking this year?  T50s or a nice PS32?

And, be like Mike, hell.  We all want to be like Skypup.

Okay, you all saw the video where I "missed" the coyote I was shooting at 125 yards:

http://www.phossil.com/thom/Night%20Vision/FLIR%20T50/Missed%20Coyote/Missed%20Coyote.wmv


WOOT WOOT WOOT -> It was not a miss!

I shot him right through the lungs and he went about 150 yards and died right there where he entered the woods!!! HAHA!!!

Found this afternoon when I went back with the bushhog to mow down the lower forty, dead right there!!

I get allot of requests to post some pics of the internal reticules built into the FLIR T-50, here are two pics of the Browning M2 .50 Cal Machine Gun BDC reticule with Chevron using 1X power:

White reticule on Hogs @ 175 Yards:



Black reticule on a coytoe @ 75 Yards:

Thanks for posting those.  When looking through the scope as a stand-alone, do you get the feeling of "looking down a long tube" or does it appear pretty normal?  The only reason I ask is because I read somewhere that clip-on sights (NV or thermal) give the impression of looking through a straw when not viewed through a magnified optic.  June can't come fast enough, I absolutely cannot wait to get one of these things.

No tube effect whatsoever, it is more like playing a video game on a computer screen.

It is strictly 2-Dimensional just like what you see in the photographs.

It is ALLOT MORE FUN than playing video games though...

Glad to hear it, this is almost too much to bear.  Might have to move my timetable up a bit  Are my eyes playing tricks on me or is the chevron in that last pic blue?