Night vision has been a long time dream of mine and I always planned on buying a PVS14 someday.

I've never seen that unit before, but if you're impressed with its performance that's all that matters. Pulsars makes both hits and misses -- their most notable hits being in digital NV and thermal monoculars.

We're generally a "go Gen 5 or go home" group, but we occasionally allow lesser beings to post here because it makes us feel better about ourselves -- i.e. "Well, it could be worse, I could own Gen 2 gear like THAT guy!"  

I think it uses the Russian EPM207G-11-13B tube.

Specs for that tube are here, if that's the tube in the unit:  http://www.ekran-os.ru/epm207g11121413eng

If this is your first night vision purchase, it's not a bad one, a few of us started out with Gen 0 Russian gear until we learned what was good and stepped up to Gen 2 or Gen3 devices, which are big leaps in performance over any Gen0 and Gen1 Russian equipment.  Like Horta said, if your satisfied with it that's all that really matters.  Never look into a Gen 3 product would be my only advise, it permanently spoils the person and causes an uncontrollable urge to sell off their stuff in order to achieve Gen 3 performance.

Some of the aliens around here have moved beyond standard Gen 3, but I wouldn't worry about that for awile, enjoy what you have human, you did good, for now.

Since I don't have the ability to compare, what does gen 3 give you over gen 2?

Well, in general Gen 3 equipment will appear clearer depending on the specs, and depends on the lighting conditions, and they tend to give you more of a usable image under darker conditions without having to use IR light as much.  The Gen 2+ equipment is good, there's nothing wrong with it, and depending on your situation, even under the darkest conditions with a little IR light, you'll still be able to see pretty darn well.  You can purchase rather cheap IR illuminators and filter materials to make the IR light less visible to your eye while still allowing your unit to see the light.  Some of the guys here are real McGuyver's with their setups and will be better able to help you out with using other IR light sources with your unit.  

Congratulations on joinig the green eye crowd, it's a fun hobby and a very useful and powerful tool you have, so enjoy it and read up here, search the archives, and ask questions, the guys will help you sqeeze the most out of your purchase.

Thanks man.

More light amplification with less noise.
More "clarity" via higher resolution.
DoF is more about optics than the tube.

As AT mentioned, Gen 3 all-but negates the necessity of IR illumination in most situations.



Gen 3 will not alleviate either issue.



Laser-based IR illuminators are virtually invisible. LED-based illuminators are visible and there is nothing you can really do about it. Filters are the worst way to achieve IR illumination and only work with pre-/non-LED lights, so you're stuck working with devices where some trade-offs are required. Laser IR illuminators have a fairly tight beam and aren't good for small spaces or illumination for walking around, but they're great for distance and weapon use.

To sum things up, Gen 1 is like looking through the bottom of a green glass beer bottle, Gen 2 is like a looking through a few layers green plastic sheeting in a snow storm, and Gen 3 is like looking through a pair of green sunglasses with a little snow falling.  All are going to have limited depth of field, but as the others have said once you go Gen 3 it is hard to go back.

p.s. one thing to keep in mind about IR illuminators is that there is a big difference between the parts of the spectrum that Gen 2 sees vs Gen 3.   Gen 3 is far more sensitive in the IR spectrum, but Gen 2 sees farther into the blue end of the spectrum.  This means any given IR illuminator will seem much brighter when viewed with a Gen 3 scope, even before you consider the added overalll light sensitivity of Gen 3.

Good thing to note here, as Horta said, if you go with LED illuminators you can't really use filters for them, to make them less visible you'd have to select one with a wavelength that's higher up the scale, say 920nm, and it will still be visible to your eye close up.  The filters work with older incandescent lights, cheap to do, but pretty inefficient.

Here is a very simple table as to what is better (top of the chart is best) (number of dots in between denotes the improvement amount) I am going to go based on SNR here on the top stuff... remember SNR is measured in dB and dB is a logarithmic scale

US Filmless Autogated Gen 3 (originally Gen4)  SNR: (high 30s -- low 40s)
.
US Thin Film Autogated Gen3 SNR: (low 30s -- high 30s)
US Thin Film OR Autogated Gen3  SNR: (high 20s -- low 30s)
.
US Filmed Gen3 SNR (low 20s -- very low 30s)
EU Photonis XR5 and similar Photonis tubes SNR (low 20s -- very low 30s)
Russian Gen3 SNR ( low20s (possibly even lower than this) -- mid 20s)
US modern Gen2 (very high 10s -- very low 20s)
.
Cascading Gen1(very high 10s -- very low 20s)
.
.
.
Russian commercial Gen2+ (mid 10s -- high 10s, possibly very very low 20s)
US old MILSPEC Gen2 (mid10s -- high 10s)
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Digital NV (n/a)
Russian Gen1 or Gen0 (n/a)

Thanks for all the info guys.

Check out the Night Vision EE currently for an example: http://www.ar15.com/forums/f_7/172_Night_Vision.html

Some of the EE items in that price range are Gen 3  PVS-14's or PVS-7's, Pitbull Monocular's etc.  But keep in mind with what you have you probably have a warranty with your unit, and you said you were happy with the performance.  Buying used sometimes can be challenging if you don't know what your getting into, it's safer to purchase in the EE than Ebay though in my opinion.

I second that. I only purchased in eBay the non-critical components, (rings, lenses...) the components that are hard to screw up once you know what to look for.

G.

Is there a generic mount to attach a monocular like this to a rifle? I'm trying to find something specific or this unit but not coming up with much and I'm not sure what's available.

Something like this?

http://www.adorama.com/PL79043.html

The standard USGI PVS-14 weapon mount works with the Challenger.

Perfect. thanks guys.