Re: NV Monocular
+1 - I agree with this completely.
You will not get a decent monocular for under $2000... And to be honest, you really need to start looking at about $3000, or hope you get really lucky and one just drops into your lap.
All single-tube Gen1 and Gen1+ are pretty much unusable if there's not a moon around.
You can make your own spotting scope with an older cascade tube and they work well, but are the size of a pringles can and weigh about 4 or 5 pounds.
You can get a Gen2 D300 for just under $2000 but they don't handle really dark situations all that well. They do work, but will suffer for lack of photocathode sensitivity and the picture is both grainy and dark.
If you're really stuck on budget, have a look at the Xgen digital. It's crap, but 16 acres is pretty small - and an Xgen will give you active vision out to about 100m and works about as well as Gen1 NV does. Anyway, the main reason for recommending that model is that it's pretty cheap and works OK. But mainly because it's cheap and I wouldn't want to recommend spending more than about $120 on anything less than Gen2. At least then if you find that you need more, you're a lot closer to saving up the $3000 or so needed for a decent NV monocular -
Sorry to bring the bad news, but we all came into this the same way you are and all learnt the hard way... Just trying to save you going through the same pain...
Regards
David
