454shooter
New member
Finally received my Hogster 35 and mounted it on my Ruger 556/223 Ranch rifle. I have it mounted back as far as possible but the eye relief is no where near close. I have to scrunch way up to contact the eye piece.
Do you experienced users have your eye against the rubber eye piece when shooting? I would imagine this would be ideal unless you are using a recoiling firearm in which I could see getting 'scoped'. I ordered a picatinny extension to move the sight back after research here.
I do have an AR (223) but use it in my employ as a School Police Officer and don't feel a thermal would be ideal if it would ever have to be deployed. (I have a Vortex 1x4 scope mounted currently)I also like to use reduced load reloads for fox and they will not cycle the AR.
My next question is on the clarity settings on the Hogster. These would be the 4 mountain looking images. Can't understand why you would set it on anything but the crispest image but I must be missing something as there are 4 choices.
On a previous post I asked what to do regarding only having one thermal. I took it out in the yard and scanned with the rifle. I was not happy with that at all and the Ranch Rifle is about as light as you can get. I did make an arca attached tripod setup and it would possibly be doable but would be slower and make more noise by having to move around the tripod. A scanner is in my future and I can definitely see that field of view is a big factor as most of my encounters with red lights were within 100 yards. The thermal likely will change that as I'm sure I have missed a lot of detection with the red lights.
I purchased a battery pack selfie stick and mounted a small picatinny to it. There is enough cable that I can scan with it and hopefully when something is spotted I can quick release the thermal and mount to the rifle on the tripod as the selfie stick hangs around my neck and still provides power to the thermal.
Time will tell on that and I expect it to work better with fox than coyote. No doubt 2 thermals are the key.
Do you experienced users have your eye against the rubber eye piece when shooting? I would imagine this would be ideal unless you are using a recoiling firearm in which I could see getting 'scoped'. I ordered a picatinny extension to move the sight back after research here.
I do have an AR (223) but use it in my employ as a School Police Officer and don't feel a thermal would be ideal if it would ever have to be deployed. (I have a Vortex 1x4 scope mounted currently)I also like to use reduced load reloads for fox and they will not cycle the AR.
My next question is on the clarity settings on the Hogster. These would be the 4 mountain looking images. Can't understand why you would set it on anything but the crispest image but I must be missing something as there are 4 choices.
On a previous post I asked what to do regarding only having one thermal. I took it out in the yard and scanned with the rifle. I was not happy with that at all and the Ranch Rifle is about as light as you can get. I did make an arca attached tripod setup and it would possibly be doable but would be slower and make more noise by having to move around the tripod. A scanner is in my future and I can definitely see that field of view is a big factor as most of my encounters with red lights were within 100 yards. The thermal likely will change that as I'm sure I have missed a lot of detection with the red lights.
I purchased a battery pack selfie stick and mounted a small picatinny to it. There is enough cable that I can scan with it and hopefully when something is spotted I can quick release the thermal and mount to the rifle on the tripod as the selfie stick hangs around my neck and still provides power to the thermal.
Time will tell on that and I expect it to work better with fox than coyote. No doubt 2 thermals are the key.