Gents,
I'm an old guy, came home from the war in 1970. Yes, real old!!
But I'm liking this night hunting for coyotes and know nothing about it.
I've got a Fox Pro call and some other handheld calls which I've used for fox, and I like the handheld better than the FP only because it's easier for me to use. Problem is I live all the way up in the NE. I hunt in PA and in NJ. Now PA is always open, and I can use a rifle. In NJ I must use a shotgun at night or a rifle in daylight and the season is mid-January to March 15th.I hunt more in Southern NJ than PA.
I need a night vision scope that will handle 12-gauge recoil. What I was going to do is try to locate with my thermal scanner and call them close enough to get a shot using the night vision scope with the shotgun. Haven't bought any optics yet but plan to purchase the Bering's Phenom 640 scanner this coming week. The night scope I'm thinking of is a Pulsar Digex C50.
If anyone is using the above equipment, please let me know the good and bad.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.
Semper Fidelis
Soup

Pulsar will handle more than the 12ga.

Theyre rated up to 338 Lapua if im not mistaken.

Id go thermal on the scope if you can stretch your budget. I have 2 thermions currently.

Nghttrn is correct. Only Pulsar's digital NV and thermal scopes are rated for a 12ga recoil. Shotguns have some nasty recoil so if you go that route I'd definitely stick with Pulsar.

If you have any questions feel free to give us a call, we'll be glad to help.

TTT

how do thermal handle vibration? Like on 4 wheeler in a 2 piece rack on the front?

How many joules of vibration are you talking about? Most will handle the recoil of a .308. Some purportedly will handle a .375 H&H (but for how long?).

How many joules of vibration are you talking about?
vibration is different than recoil.
Ordered an rattler today so we'll see.

Vibration is generally quantified as G^2 rms (g squared rms) over a defined frequency band. I've programmed shaker systems specifically used for vibration testing and I have done a bit of that vibration testing myself.

Recoil tolerance ratings on night vision, as far as I have seen, is given in Gs only.

Actually, I now recall one of the Photon DNV scopes having a recoil rating given in Joules. That's the only place I've ever seen that...I haven't seen everything, of course.

I first saw it with Pulsar. Then, Sightmark via Sellmark, the importer of Pulsar there in Mansfield, TX is also the owner of Sightmark, but I don't think they were the first, but were the first one's to do it consistently. I think Sellmark followed suit with what Pulsar was doing. Pulsar did it in Joules, I believe, for a couple of reasons which do make sense. First, recoil from two rifles of the same caliber can be quite varied depending on the overall mass of the rifle that needs to be moved by the recoil before it starts to impact the optics, and second, the bullet weight and loading. A light bullet in a heavy rifle is going to have much less recoil than a hot loaded heavy bullet in the lightweight version of the rifle. So you can't really say this rifle is rated to .308 unless it is rated for absolutely every configuration in .308.

Here, it is important to note that the scopes were rated in joules they could handle that actually impacted the scope. Few people are going to calculate the joules experienced by the scope by determining the joules of the loading versus the scope's experienced joules once the rifle, etc. data are taken into consideration and most people don't have the machine to measure this while firing the rifle to see how much it is. So most companies just round off to generic caliber descriptions (at least here in America) that folks generally understand.

I believe it was Pulsar that was also noted a rating up to a given caliber (.375 H&H?) which sounds really good, but when you checked the joules rating, it didn't really cover all of the caliber's options.

Yes, that does make sense. But it is kind of cryptic, too, for the reasons you've pointed out. When I was considering using a Photon XT which I still had at the time on a new AR in 6.8 SPC, I looked at the rating and all I could come up with was "huh?" That's when I posted the question in this very forum. The heck of it is, it was only about four or five months ago. I think my hard drive needs a good defrag, but tequila is something I try to avoid these days.

Didn't mean to start this discussion but it is interesting. Do they actually test or just verify after a few shots that it's good? I'm very familiar with the Mil Spec environmental testing. Real world test of optics on a 155mm cannon projectile didn't work too well. My normal rifle scope handle the vib OK, don't know about all the computer stuff inside an IR scope will do. Guess I'll find out.

OK, ran around a bit with the rifle in Kolpin mounts on front of ATV, lots of vibration. Rattler still worked fine. Big difference in view between it and ATN scanner. Sat for about and hour after dusk, no hogs seen. Darn. Did see tracks at the other feeder next day.