Got myself a moon rock. Possibly the only pvs-5 tube in the country.



Took the objective off first thing to see how the tube looks like and discovered that the PC is grey. All the 9916 tubes i've seen have blue PC's. It's fine right?



I gathered whatever junk i had laying around and made it into a monocular.





So i believe this is the C-variant, am i right? And the tube looks to be an mx-9916. The image is really good, there is zero distortion and it seems quite a bit brighter than my P8079HP with F1.1 objective.

Too bad i can't really test it right now since it's sunshine 24/7 here.

Not a moon rock...

Have two Varo's [IIRC, 1986] from a Gen 3 conv.

Finland though

It looks like a B variant tube with a C variant lens, which is pretty good. Could be a C-variant tube, though I never did find out if the light brown PCs were B or C.

Yes, that's a great lens. You can actually rehouse the entire thing and build a more commercial looking device, but it seems good just the way you've done it and there's no improvement in performance from doing so.

Great work there on the setup - :) It should perform well and if it's bright, that's good news. Your P8079 might outperform it in very low light though due to differences in noise, but I wouldn't worry about that too much. You have a head mounted monocular now. That's a big step up from a P8079HP

David

Good job op. Lens is C for sure.

Thanks for the replies and to David for all the informative posts and videos on nv. I have learned a lot from them.

Just spent about an hour in a darkened garage with this contraption on, doing all sorts of tasks and here are some things i noticed:

It has a very quick and responsive ABC. Does that indicate a C-variant tube?

The setup needs a bit of work but it's surprisingly sturdy and not too tiring to wear. I need to add some string to catch the tube in case the mount fails.

The aperture being f/1.05, the focus needs a lot of adjusting. I can see why they went with more narrow apertures with later gen 3 models even when it means loss in system gain. Also less glass means less weight.

Also those who say that a pnv-57e is as good as a pvs-5, have never looked through one.

Yup the 1.05 tubes need more turning due to narrower focal plane.

ABC is quick on all 9916 tubes in my experience, given the date on it Id guess its a C tube rather than an older model with a C lens on it. Also if it came from turkey its most likely a C tube.

And yeah, I know the site you are talking about with pvn57e. And having both, the pvn isnt even remotely close to even early pvs5s. Plus I think my set wants to give me eye cancer.

cool monocular!

i do stop down the objective lens when using NOD in full moon or in mid summer nights .
10mm aperture is enough for clear full moon night light conditions.

and
an iris diaphragm attached in front of objective lens will solve both problems.

like this

Ok. We'll go with C then.

^I guess the ABC is there to keep the tube within safe limits but can it be relied on? Aperture adjustment would be a nice addition. We don't have really dark nights too often, pretty much only in autumn.

Short clip from the garage at night. You can see how bright it is outside. Weird flickering dots are caused by the ir rangefinder thing on the camera.

https://youtu.be/3NT-OPr_aOw

Upon a second look it definitely seems that someone not-so careful swapped out the tube. Some of those speckles on the pc came out with careful cleaning.



It's still so bright at night that the tube won't run at full power.

Looks good. From the video it looks like it works pretty well.

Working pretty well indeed. It's a fairly clean tube with only a few tiny spots.



Close enough to zero distortion, especially after using the P8079.


I got the PC completely clean. There's a lot of fine dirt on the screen as well. Can't get the lens out though, it's either stuck or i'm doing something wrong.

The pictures don't want to embed right away. I guess that's because i have so few posts?