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Posted: 9/2/2019 6:02:12 PM EDT
Been shooting more and more for distance at night. Either with a 3x on the pvs or a clip on on my 10x NSX.
One thing I’ve been struggling with is guessing range at night. I’m generally pretty good with guesstimating yardage during the day. From 100-6-700 I can get myself pretty close. Under nods this seems pretty darn impossible. What do others do under this scenario? Is the best idea to start familiarization with common items to guesstimate range? Fencepost ext? |
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Maybe comparing what things look like at range with an illuminator like a SPIR or Luna would help. In the same manner one compares sizes things appear as at various ranges during the day and calls them.
When we go to long range shoots as a family, I always have everyone make up a range card using estimates, the Steiner binocs, scope reticles and various "low tech" methods before checking with the laser rangefinder. It's a good skill most people don't bother with any more. But practiced a lot you can get pretty damn close estimates this way. |
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The discontinued SWR Radius is pretty popular for night time longer range shooting. You’ll be able to find a bunch more photos of setups and reviews over on Sniper’s Hide but here’s one example.
Sorry I wish it was easier to snag a photo and link it here from mobile. https://images.app.goo.gl/nWBDguaQ8ns2PLUE9 |
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The discontinued SWR Radius is pretty popular for night time longer range shooting. You’ll be able to find a bunch more photos of setups and reviews over on Sniper’s Hide but here’s one example. Sorry I wish it was easier to snag a photo and link it here from mobile. https://images.app.goo.gl/nWBDguaQ8ns2PLUE9 View Quote |
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SWR Radius if you can find one. They are priceless for unknown distance long range night vision shooting. I have little to no use for it in daytime but it has a quickish-detach mount so it comes off and on easily.
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No reason to make it more complicated. You want one of these.
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No reason to make it more complicated. You want one of these. View Quote I have been using a plrf with nods and it works very well. |
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SWR Radius looks like it was an awesome piece of kit for 1k. Wondering why they discontinued that as well.
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No reason to make it more complicated. You want one of these. View Quote |
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At most realistic distances you can see a rangefinders IR laser “pinging” off the object. This has worked well enough for me to use the rangefinder in one eye and my -14 in the other. It takes a bit of practice, but I have ranged out to 500 at night.
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I know the question was with nods but I know with thermal, you get pretty good at telling by the size of the animal at a specific scope magnification level. Another trick typically with thermal is once you can start to differentiate various heat elements on the animal such as the face and legs are much warmer than the body on the coyote, it is inside 250 yards. This varies on brand and base magnification, but holds fairly true on many thermals.
Boblov and Laserworks makes a very reasonable one that can be found on Amazon. It will probably get you to 250 to maybe 300 yards on a coyote, and around 600-700 on buildings, trees, etc. I recently received one from Uineye which seems to have a little more range than the previous two mentioned. I need to do more testing to see if it really has more range or not but it seams to bump the coyote sized animal to 350-400 and you can range large objects to around 900+. These solutions are not a Radius but they will at least tell you if a coyote is close enough so you don't need any hold-over at a reasonable price between $100-$130. |
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Been shooting more and more for distance at night. Either with a 3x on the pvs or a clip on on my 10x NSX. One thing I’ve been struggling with is guessing range at night. I’m generally pretty good with guesstimating yardage during the day. From 100-6-700 I can get myself pretty close. Under nods this seems pretty darn impossible. What do others do under this scenario? Is the best idea to start familiarization with common items to guesstimate range? Fencepost ext? View Quote Helmet mounted/or without a scope/optic that has stadia, experience helps. Learn the relative size of things at different ranges and get a "feel" for it, same as you do during the day. May not be laser-guided accurate, but enough time under the goggles, you should be able to get a decent sense of approximate ranges. FWIW, my property is dotted with range stakes all over the place. To the casual observer, they just look like surveying poles or something, but on my property, I have a target reference point from just about anywhere from any other point, which, since I'm not regularly defending my home against enemy hordes, does also help me get a sense of what different ranges look like with a known distance while I'm just farting around with my NODs, and knowing how big my dogs are when they're running around at night helps too. Gadgetry is fun and can be enormously helpful, but it's also not a replacement for simple experience and time spent under NODs and getting used to the spatial relationships through the tube. ~Augee |
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At most realistic distances you can see a rangefinders IR laser “pinging” off the object. This has worked well enough for me to use the rangefinder in one eye and my -14 in the other. It takes a bit of practice, but I have ranged out to 500 at night. View Quote |
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Your NODs can see your rangefinder's laser? Huh. I don't think this works for me. View Quote Very basically, many civi rangefinders use a pulsing infrared laser that is visible to common NVGs, so it's sometimes doable to look through your NVGs at the target and activate your rangefinder without looking through it, then walk the blinking dot/bar-shape onto the target, let go of the button, then quickly look into the eyepiece to see what number is reading. There are however different wavelengths that rangefinders use, and many of the higher power ones are up in the 1500nm range where most of our NVGs can't see them. In short, at medium ranges where you can see the target pretty well through your non-magnified NVGs, it's a decent technique using plain old laser rangefinders without needing to get more fancy equipment. |
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Oh god, I'm smelling another OOB conversation brewing. Very basically, many civi rangefinders use a pulsing infrared laser that is visible to common NVGs, so it's sometimes doable to look through your NVGs at the target and activate your rangefinder without looking through it, then walk the blinking dot/bar-shape onto the target, let go of the button, then quickly look into the eyepiece to see what number is reading. There are however different wavelengths that rangefinders use, and many of the higher power ones are up in the 1500nm range where most of our NVGs can't see them. In short, at medium ranges where you can see the target pretty well through your non-magnified NVGs, it's a decent technique using plain old laser rangefinders without needing to get more fancy equipment. View Quote View All Quotes View All Quotes Quoted:
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Your NODs can see your rangefinder's laser? Huh. I don't think this works for me. Very basically, many civi rangefinders use a pulsing infrared laser that is visible to common NVGs, so it's sometimes doable to look through your NVGs at the target and activate your rangefinder without looking through it, then walk the blinking dot/bar-shape onto the target, let go of the button, then quickly look into the eyepiece to see what number is reading. There are however different wavelengths that rangefinders use, and many of the higher power ones are up in the 1500nm range where most of our NVGs can't see them. In short, at medium ranges where you can see the target pretty well through your non-magnified NVGs, it's a decent technique using plain old laser rangefinders without needing to get more fancy equipment. |
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Quoted: Oh god, I'm smelling another OOB conversation brewing. Very basically, many civi rangefinders use a pulsing infrared laser that is visible to common NVGs, so it's sometimes doable to look through your NVGs at the target and activate your rangefinder without looking through it, then walk the blinking dot/bar-shape onto the target, let go of the button, then quickly look into the eyepiece to see what number is reading. There are however different wavelengths that rangefinders use, and many of the higher power ones are up in the 1500nm range where most of our NVGs can't see them. In short, at medium ranges where you can see the target pretty well through your non-magnified NVGs, it's a decent technique using plain old laser rangefinders without needing to get more fancy equipment. View Quote |
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Many Cheaper, shorter range (<2000 yards) LRFs use 820-940nm IR lasers.
More expensive, longer range LRFs use 1550nm lasers. You’ll need SWIR to detect that. |
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Quoted: I can confirm that this technique works, at least with my PVS-14 and a Leupold RX-1200i TBR rangefinder. Just as posted above, you can see the IR laser pulsing and guide it onto your target. View Quote |
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They were on clearance for $500 when they first got discontinued :) View Quote |
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You could solve all of this quite simply with a RAPTAR/S and SkeetIRx with Trace/IR.
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You could solve all of this quite simply with a RAPTAR/S and SkeetIRx with Trace/IR. View Quote |
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One of the first things I did with my Sig range finder was go out and look at it under NV. Definitely visible, if a bit blinky.
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One of the first things I did with my Sig range finder was go out and look at it under NV. Definitely visible, if a bit blinky. View Quote |
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This is on the right track.....
Now We need an atlas with a lrf .... https://www.pulsar-nv.com/glo/products/33/thermal-imaging-binoculars/accolade-lrf |
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