For this week’s Friday Night Lights we will take a look at some interesting night vision and thermal products from various manufacturers. There are some thermal fusion weapon sights along with articulating fusion night vision goggles from a number of manufacturers. Lets dive into this Friday Night Lights Shot Show 2020 NVG Round Up.

Excelitas Talon

Excelitas is a British company and they have a night vision fusion clip on. Think of a PSQ-20 but weapon mountable. Unlke the COTI, the Talon fuses the thermal image after the image intensifier. If you recall the COTI inserts a thermal image into the front objective and while you can see thermal information projected into your field of view, it is still the same color as your night vision. By having the thermal image porjected after the image intensifier you can get a different color palate. See the photo below and you can see the orange thermal image overlaid on top of the night vision image.

The photo above is looking through a Vortex Razor 1-6x. The photo below is looking directly inside the Talon. The field of view of the thermal image is rather small compared to the COTI but when you look into the Talon using an optic it fills up the field of view as seen above.

The thermal sensor and germanium lens is slightly offset so at extreme close distance will the two images be misaligned. This is not really an issue since you are only using the thermal for detection and aiming using the night vision image.

The downside is that the Talon is for military and law enforcement sales only. It costs around $20,000 for a single unit. Discounts for buying multiple of course.

Night Vision Inc’s Micro And ANVS RNVG

Night Vision Inc will be carrying the DTNVS housings just like TNVC. They are also going to offer the RNVG MIcro. The RNVG Micro uses 16mm Photonis image intensifier tubes. Typical night vision uses 18mm tubes. So you get a 40% weight reduction in just the tubes alone. They will feature similar functionality as the RNVG but weigh less.

RNVG Micro on the right, RNVG ANVS on the left.

Night Vision Inc will also offer RNVG upgrade housings for people who have ANVS9 goggles. For $2000 Night Vision Inc will swap the glass and tubes into the RNVG ANVS for you. ANVS housings are rather fragile so upgrading to a ruggedized housing may be something you should look into.

ASU Night Vision – E3 Aviation Goggles

In this Friday night lights Shot Show 2020 round up I found an interesting night vision goggle made for aviation reasons. The goggles are ANVS pattern but the housing has gone through significant changes to shave weight.

ASU elimiated the bridge entirely and opted for articulating monocular pods. This is your adjustment for inter-pupilary distance.

The intriguing aspect of the ASU E3 goggles is the fact that there is no housing to hold the image intensifier tubes. Instead the monocular body is the exterior skin of the image intensifier tube.

The ASU E3 goggles weigh just 400 grams which is 14.1 ounces. A PVS-14 weighs just 316 grams or 11.1 oz.

Unity Tactical FAST Mounts And Magnifier Mounts

Unity Tactical makes the 2020 night vision round up for their new FAST MRO mount and magnifier mounts. Last year they released the Aimpoint magnifier mount and said they were going to make one for the Eotech G33. Well it is finally here.

It functions just like the Aimpoint FAST FTC magnifier mount. Just push it to the left and the G33 rolls/folds down directly ontop of the top rail. This cleans up the pro

Unity Tactical has FAST risers for Aimpoint T1/T2 style optics as well as the generic riser which most people use with Eotech HWS. Well now they are going to make a riser for the Trijicon MRO.

They are also making a magnifier flip mount for the Vortex micro mount.

 

Unity Tactical is collaborating with Modlite to make the ModButton. It is somewhat similar to the hot button but it has an integrated light mount.  The one pictured below is for controlling a laser with an Insight port. They will make versions with SureFire plugs so you can control your Modlite lights or any other lights that use the SureFire tailcap.

Photonis 2020 NVG Round Up

Last year Photonis had mentioned that they were working on 16mm image intensifier tubes. They are smaller in diameter but still sees the same 40° field of view. The benefit to 16mm tubes is that they are 40% lighter in weight.

Another benefit of Photonis over gallium arsenide (Gen 3 US night vision tubes) is that they operate in a wider bandwidth. 350nM up to 1100nM. So they can see out of band wavelengths that normal US Gen 3 night vision cannot see. Take a look at the video below. The Steiner strobe operates at a wavelength too high for gallium arsenide to see.

 

 

Photonis will have some light weight binocular night vision devices (BNVD). The housing photographed below are made of magnesium and only weight 350g fully built. If it was an aluminum housing then it would be 400g.

 

I was particularly interested in their panoramic night vision goggles. Unfortunately they are expensive. Price is yet to be determined but it is be close to L3Harris GPNVG price. A little bit cheaper but close. So I suspect they will want $30k. Unlike the GPNVG these Photonis panos have to use a battery backpack. There is no onboard power and it uses a mount rather than the ball detent style used for ANVS9 or ANVS10 goggles.

Not sure why this battery pack is so large?

They do have fused occulars and it looks similar to the ANVS10 PNVGs that I played with last year.

Elbit Systems 2020 NVG Round Up

Elbit Systems recently acquired the night vision division of Harris. Harris joined L3 and are now called L3Harris. Elbit has an articulating fusion goggle called the ENVG-B. The original ENVGs were the PSQ-20s which were a monocular night vision device with thermal fusion. The ENVG-B is the binocular version of the ENVGs.

The goggle has articularing pods. You can see the large thermal sensor stick out of the side of the right monocular pod.

Elbit was nice enough to let me have a set of binos. I’m talking about their marketing swag, a Viewmaster bino.

 

L3Harris Thermal Fusion Goggles

Just like the Elbit ENVG-B, L3Harris has their own thermal fusion binocular goggle. As you can see in the photo below it too is articulated.

 

I hope you enjoyed this 2020 NVG round up. It is not often we get to see first hand some of the newest night vision technology. Most of these are way outside our budgets and are made only for military and possibly law enforcement.