Thermal scanner

[chaser_2332]

I’m running an AGM35-384 at the recommendation of my dealer and so far it has been amazing

 

[Benzy2]

I’d say it really depends on where you hunt and how familiar you are with the area. I found even great thermal units hard to use to identify at long range in a Sandy/rocky environment. Too many rocks holding heat to know if the far off pixels are alive or not, and if they are alive, what they are. On the other hand, sitting over an empty field with a layer of snow, it’s really easy to pick things out from one side to the other.

I’ve tried great thermal optics like the 640 SkeetIR all the way down to ATN and phone plugins like the Seek. To me, once you were on a 320 core with a decent (read at least 30 hz) refresh rate and ideally an actual germanium lens, it was all pretty good. The lower tier 160 cores as well as the phone plug ins were ok for their price but not something I enjoyed and certainly not good enough to ID and animal.

ID is another topic. I find thermal really weak at IDing shootable things at much distance, even a 640 core. It’s great at detecting, but I can’t tell a fox from a coyote, from some dogs through thermal. I can tell a pig from a coyote from a whitetail, but things like calves can look a lot like pigs. Small pigs can look a lot like ground hogs and raccoons. There are plenty of stories of mistaken identity using thermal. I would spend a lot of time through the optic you use to get great at ID. I’ve been lucky that the majority of my thermal hunts have been in a setting where there was certainty on what was what (no cattle, lots of pigs, a few coyote, and really anything smaller than a deer was shootable)