15 month old ITTExelis Pinnacle Night Enforcer. I play with it in my backyard every couple of weeks for about 10 minutes each time...this unit has seriously not been used much at all...never been dropped or handled roughly....

....last night, i put in a battery went outside, turned it on...it lit up for about 2 seconds and the went black.

....i reached up to fiddle with the switch...it lit back up...then went black again after a few seconds...

...i turned it off, then back on....nothing happened, still black. turned on ir, the red light lit up but screen still black...tried different battery...

...turned off/on again...briefly lit up, then went about 80% dim with a big black "splotch" in the middle of the screen..

...then it just stayed black regardless of what I did. It was dead....went to bed angry...


...woke up this AM, stepped into the dark sauna...it turned on, then 100% black...with ir on, red light lights up fine AND I could see the shadow of my hand wave in front of the screen like it was workng at 2%. Stayed like this....


...the sun sets, step outside when it s dark, turn it on, light up, then goes black....seems to light back up with the "shaking" and jostling I was doing....

...so i slap it....it light up 100%....working fine now....i have slapped it and shook it and now it seems to be fine...



So, here are my questions:

1. If it is a loose connection, what was the dark "splotch" in the middle of the field of view when it was lighting up at about 5%?

2. Also, if it is a loose connection, how come when it was completely black I couldn't see anything, but with IR on I could see the shadow of my hand passing in front of the screen?

3. What the hell is going on with this thing? Is it the tube? A connection?

4. Should I send it in for repair? Duh? What will they do to it?

Thanks in advance.

Change battery if you haven't already and is it connected to a surplus or even new J arm? Might be the tarded auto cutoff acting up. Try some electrical tape over the contacts & see if that helps.

Warning, I am not recommending you do this.........


When I was in the service, every now and then a 14 would do what you described. One of my SSGT course of actions was to throw it at the ground. They always worked after that.

I have no idea why or what it accomplished but it worked.

I always found it quite amusing, I was lucky and had a kick ass tube that made all the others look bad.

LOL, custodians of our tax dollars :)

Reminds me of Top Gun

My guess is auto cutoff connected. There are two pins and ribbon cables that control the auto off in the housing. Not sure how that would act up since the cables are on the pins pretty tight. Then on the exterior you have the auto shutoff contacts for the J arm. See if they have corrosion on them or something funky. Good news is that the auto cutoff has nothing to do with the tube if that is the issue and at worst you would have to replace the battery compartment circuit board and wiring.

Eta: Read through it again. You said you could see your hand through it but it was dark? That doesn't sound auto cutoff related but hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me will come along with a better idea. Almost sounds power supply related but I have never gotten to play with tube internals so I have no clue.

you should have posted if this was a new, or used unit that you got, and if there is a warrantee.

speculation - loose/poor connection so there wasn't enough voltage to fully power the tube, so it barely would work.

if it is under warrantee, send it back

if it is not, and you are not mechanically or electrically incline, send it to someone like wilcox (the individual) for repair.

if you want to take a look to see if the tube had possibly rotated so it had a bad connection, like if the index pin had broken or bent, you could look at these two videos and see how it comes apart and goes together.

tube removal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmeCVIT-7fM

build
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTwvNjY8210

take it apart and make sure the contacts on the intensifier tube are clean, and the tube indexes on the pin properly

I bought it new 6/16, still under warranty. I called Harris on Friday attempting to get an RMA and was transferred three times and dead ended at a voicemail. To be fair, It was close to the end of the day

I just wanted to hopefully get an idea of what was going wrong with it.

What relly freaked me out was when it went dim there appeared to be a large, dark and irregularly shaped splotch in the middle of the screen that was completely black...almost like some of the recoil damaged tubes i've seen on this forum....but when it went back on 100% there was no trace of any splotch or blem., this has never been weapon mounted or dropped and probably has less than 90 minutes of use.

I played with it a little again tonight and can't get the problem to reoccur....which sucks. I envision sending it in to Harris and them turning it on and it looking like it is in perfect shape and sending it back to me without doing anything.

How good are they at diagnosing stuff like this? Are there "system checks" they can do to detect problems?...

There is no way any rotatin pin is broke because I baby my stuff. If something is loose it must have shipped from the factory like that.

Can Harris tell if I "pop the hood" and peak in to see if there are any obvious loose wires? I would be reluctant to void my waranty, but then again i've heard horror stories of monoculars not being returned for months when sent in for warranty work.

Wouldn't mess with it until warranty options are exhausted.

Personally I think it is the battery housing circuit board. These can fail and create insufficient voltage to properly start the tube.

The test is to remove the tube from thebhousing and apply 3v directly to the tube contacts (from a single CR123A battery) and if the tube is OK it will light right up.

Well, I just spoke to a real nice guy named Mike at the Harris repair department…he said it sounded like the assembly that secures the tube might be loose or possibly the tube going bad.

I will be sending it in. I feel a lot better having spoken to the repair guy as he sounded very knowledgeable and concerned. He said it would probably be returned in 2-3 weeks.

Very easy to deal with. I will update after it is returned.

Thanks to you posters who dropped some knowledge on me.

This could quite honestly be a few things from the corcuitry in the battery compartment having some issue to the tubes power supply itself. The thing you noted that has me leaning towards the tubes power supply being the issue is that black splotch. If the photocathode isnt supplied the voltage it requires yo operate normally then ususlly it will leave an area of the image as a black "splotch"for lack of a better term at the moment. This splotch usually will be at the center of the image and the surrounding areas will be showing the scene. This can be seen quite easily when a tube is powered by a power supply with a lower photocathode output volltage than the tube requires. The sporradic working state of the tube also indicates a failing PSU as well, to me. I have had to rebuild more than a few tubes that had similar issues and mate them to a new power supply because the original one was causing similar issues. 

If the tube is still under warranty, i suggest you use the warranty to have it replaced. If its not under warranty, then you at least have the fact that the tube itsepf is as clean as it was when you last used it and it was working fine. You can have the tube rebuilt wth a new power supply for much less than the cost of another tube to replace it.

Wow, good information...thanks.

The "splotch" was worrisome....it looked like several big drops of ink had been dropped into the middle of the screen.

It looks 100% now...but my spider sense is tingling.

I hope they just replace the tube.

BTW, what is the word on the street on these types of repairs? Do these companies try to rebuild/repair stuff or do they just change parts if something is amis?

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