Hello everyone,

I managed to repair the flashing photonis tube I bought from itchy trigger. It needed a new psu so I installed it in a psu from a fat anvis tube that had gone dim (thanks chosos!). It seems to work perfectly now, just need to install it in a housing, I'll try to get some through tube pics tonight.

Maybe someone can figure out what I used for the boot?

Nice work :)

David

Dude, that is super cool... Keep this up and you, David and Dino will all be in the same club!

nice work!

Thanks guys. This second one was way easier.

Dude, this! I had my hands shaking just slapping together a 14, this is just nuts When is it going to be ready to be put in a housing? Those Photonis tubes looked really, really good.

I have the tube mocked up in a dark invader housing (only thing I have that will take the fat anvis tube). After scrubbing the lenses a bunch if times I narrowed down the blems to a single smallish ish sized one in zone two. Shows at about 3:30 half way to the middle in the below pic. Not too bad really. My camera skills are severely lacking but the photo gives an idea of performance. It took some time adjusting the pots to attain some semblance of normalcy. At first I had the gain cranked way too high and the noise was really bad. I think I have an equilibrium now.

Has anyone seen those home made unfinished housings on ebay that take the pvs5 optics and tube? I was thinking of going that route with this tube. Anyone have experience with that setup?

The photonis tubes i had were well in the range of gen 3 performance. They were better than the litton gen 2+ tubes that power supply came from, and i bet that litton power supply is tough as nails, so this should be a nice combo.

This is a pretty cool project, and eventually i'm going to try doing one of these instead of selling you all my dead stuff. Lol. I'm just glad you're taking lots of photos and sharing the process, because that was my only request. So thanks for doing this. I didn't think the repotting procedure would be that horrible.

1. What are you using for vacuum, and what amount of vacuum are these sitting at and for how long?
2. How much do you have invested in deoxit, elastomer, and your vacuum setup?
3. What do you think it costs you per tube to repot them?

First off, with out the help of a few members here, I probably would have waisted a lot of money in failed attempts.

Low light is where these tubes betray their gen, IMO. They seem more in the omni II range in low light. This one gets the job done under overcast moonlight for sure.

Right now cost is high per tube because I have only done two, like anything else that is material intensive the per tube cost will go down as the initial investment is amortized over many more.  Total investment at this point between tools and materials is around $1000, this includes a nice volt meter and a few other things. I've also spent about $2000 on broken nv gear!  Components for slim anvis are difficult to find, especially PSUs and modules.  

Check out "best value vacs"

28hg does the trick. Both on the raw elastomer and once it's in the tube.

3D print up your own housing, the focal distances should all be the same for a gen-3 module, all you would need to adapt is the bore of the housing to fit your tube diameter.

CJ7Hawk has a very nice 3d printable monocular design, I have a few prototypes I am developing using his press fit C-mount flange objective concept. My first printed prototype is actually on the truck for delivery today.

Chosos sent me a printed out housing. It looks pretty good I just need to source the lenses and do some work with the battery housing. A project for the future.

Here  it is in it's permanent home. Testing it out last night the low light performance was much better compared to the dark invader I had it mocked up in, which is odd because I'm using the same objective lens. Overall I'm impressed with the photonis module.

Nice job man! :)

G.