I've got one, overall it's not a bad little system for simple head harness--though mine is currently in pieces waiting for me to have some spare time to transplant it onto a boonie hat.

It's a whole hell of a lot better than this thing:






That being said, I also have two Crye Night Caps (marketing problems ) and I don't really have an issue with those either and haven't really necessarily got strong opinions either way.

At the end of the day, while I've spent a good time wearing various different head-harnesses, I don't really use or prefer head harnesses all that much, and to me the biggest benefit is honestly concealability and compactness for travel when you either can't, or don't want to bother with a full helmet setup, whether that's because you're in an extremely non-permissive environment where you need to remain as clandestine as possible, or when your wife has told you you absolutely, positively may not bring an Ops-Core helmet on vacation with you and you need to remain as clandestine as possible.

FWIW, while I don't live in Arizona, I do live in Coastal South Carolina, so heat is definitely a thing, 'cept we don't get that nice, comfy dry heat like y'all do, it's the "step out side and immediately feel wet while being mercilessly swarmed by no-see-'ums and 'skeeters kinda heat."

What I will say is that if you don't get itchy wearing a ballcap (you may, dunno), then I don't really think you'll have that much trouble with the Night Cap if it serves your needs otherwise.

Beyond that, in bad heat and humidity, I prefer a well ventilated Bump Helmet over a head harness, not only are Bump helmets way more rigid and stable than a head harness, which is important for long-term wear--what many may not consider or even notice in a conscious way, is that if your mounting platform is not stable, even a poorly fitted helmet / helmet with a poor suspension, the constant, possibly imperceptible movement and shifting in your head is going to require you to make a lot of micro-adjustments, if not to the harness / helmet itself then with your neck to account for the instability, which again, you may not realize or notice that you're doing at the time but over time leads to accelerated fatigue and neck strain, something that even with good helmets is recognized by professional users and organizations to contribute to eventual neck injury--like any other muscle, the more it's been overtaxed and strained, the more likely you will be to injure it.

And while I know there will be some folks who say "well I just tighten the shit out of it, and it doesn't budge," it doesn't really take a graduate level understanding of structural physics to understand how a rigid helmet would be more stable, especially with a big, off-axis weight sticking out on the end, unless you're using a really really crappy helmet or suspension.

Even discounting rigidity, however, another thing to consider is that no matter how surefooted or clumsy you are, your chances of taking a spill and cracking your gourd unavoidably increase if you're moving around wearing night vision, whether you're talking the [relatively] unfamiliar weight on your head that could potentially affect balance or simply because of the technical limitations of modern night vision technology in terms of limited FOV, lack of color cues that normally help us distinguish and comprehend things in our surrounds, and depth of field / fixed focal plane.

Finally, in terms of the heat issue--yes, even a very well ventilated Bump helmet like the Ops-Core is still going to trap slightly more heat than an open or mesh head harness is, however, at least for me, with a Bump helmet, you can just take the thing off from time to time, take a breath, sit a spell, grab a drink of water, whatever, and then you just pop the thing back on, and go about your business with no or minimal readjustment.

With a head harness, and maybe I'm just bad at it, there's basically no real "just take it off and put it back on." No matter how briefly I've removed it, I pretty much always have to fiddle with it again, make sure it seats properly, make sure the straps are in the right place, re-tighten things, etc., and again, based on the design, it kind of has to be that way--if you've got it tightened enough to fit securely on your head with minimal movement, it's usually too small to easily remove and/or don again without re-loosening things, and unlike a helmet, running a soft harness slightly loose in even low intensity activities is not really an option. If a Bump helmet is slightly worse at releasing heat, and a head harness is slightly better, taking them off once in a while without having to fiddle with it (which, if you know heat, just ends up making you way hotter and sweat more, defeating the point of taking it off in the first place, and often causing anything close to your face to fog up) beats the pants off them both and more than averages out.

Again, this is not me saying head harnesses are terrible and no one should ever use them, they're a good at what they were made for and a good tool to have in the toolbox--whereas I can fit my NOD and mount in our NVG-PPE pouch, and stick all that inside my helmet, I can take a Crye Night Cap or Tracer rig and stick it inside of an NVG-PPE... with the goggle and mount.

Honestly, probably the best head harness I've used so far has been the new 4D Tactical SOF Cap (coming soon(TM) ), however, the SOF Cap is (at least depending on options) basically a helmet without the shell, in and that it's got a full up Galvion fit band (very similar to the Ops-Core), dial, and chinstrap assembly, and it's about the only "soft" rig I've ever used that holds its shape well enough to easily don and doff, similar to a Bump Helmet, however as a result, it doesn't compress nearly as much as, and therefore pack as small as other head harness options, meaning you can't stuff it in a cargo pocket or an NVG pouch (you could stick the NVG-PPE inside of it, and it would still fold / crumple up smaller than a helmet though) and it also basically costs as much as Bump helmet (the intended niche is basically as a "helmet light," for anyone that's wondering, to reduce headborne system weight as much as possible, long range reconnaissance type stuff among others, where you may not want or need to haul a full helmet around for an extended duration. It's also being explored as an option for explosive breaching as a way to mitigate blast wave effects... however this becomes its own sort of Catch-22, because explosive breaching tends to come with a whole other set of reasons why you might want to wear a ballistic helmet, particularly in an operational setting where there's probably a reason you're blowing doors open to begin with, though to be fair, the broad intent is for training use only...).

~Augee