Archer and Longbow Night Vision Reviews by the Warrener

Archer Night Vision Review

The Archer night vision unit is a small, compact high strength monocular that has been designed and manufactured solely in the United Kingdom. Archer can be used to fulfil a variety of roles such as surveillance, night observation, security and pest control. The Archer attaches to the front of your scope via a bayonet attachment.

Sold by Starlight, it comes with a standard fitting that will accept various lenses in 25mm, 50mm and 75mm focal lengths. Various western manufactured image intensifier tubes can be fitted at the request of the customer. The device is usually supplied as standard with either a Dutch or a French image intensifier tube.

Being of UK origin and manufactured in the UK, one of Archer's main selling points is that it can be quickly repaired or modified should the need ever arise. We didn't put it to the test, though it sounds like the British Leyland argument against buying Japanese cars - that you can't get the parts when, most of the time (unlike British Leyland) you don't need the parts.

Most of the Archer's components and sub-components are manufactured within the UK and it does not contain anything from Russia, which has recently gained a poor reputation for night vision as the best of its ex-military stock has been sold off and only the dross and arisings remain.

When used as the day/night scope configuration, Archer is set up so that the cross hairs of the rifle scope are visible at night through the monocular. The Archer can then be detached and used as either a x1 or a x2 viewing device for scanning for rabbits or foxes.

Foxes can be spotted at more than 100 yards using the x2 Archer. When vermin is spotted, such as a fox, the Archer can be re-attached to the fittings of the rifle scope in 2-3 seconds and a shot can then be taken. The advantages of not swinging a heavy, loaded rifle and night sight around are obvious and cannot be overstated.

It is tough and designed to be convenient. The units run from a single AA battery. Electrical contacts are goldplated and switches are military specification, with strong construction. It has a long eye relief eyepiece fitted and an interchanegable front lens for higher magnification.

Starlight also sell the Kite and Longbow set-ups, which are achieving something close to legendary status - and a near-mythical pricepoint of upto £5000 depending on what you want. But if you're a keeper, why not go to your boss and tell him that £5000 amortised over ten years is only £500 a year. If you've fox damage at £500 a year - and many of the big shoots can claim at least that - which you can deal best with a super night-vision set-up, then that's what you should be geting for Christmas.

Longbow Night Vision Review

The Warrener cuts a dash in foxing circles. His success as a fox caller, his invention of new fox catching techniques and his videos have all brought him a huge following around the UK and beyond, as far as the USA.

Any larger than life country character makes you think: is it all mouth and no action? Well there's another side to Pat Carey (his real name). He has an almost scientific obsession with perfecting the foxshooter's craft. It's no accident that he can call foxes almost up to the muzzle of his rifle in daylight.

Pat starts with the fact that foxes have three tripwires to the sensitive alarm bells in their heads: sound sight and smell. His job is not only to make sure they can't see, hear or smell him, but to offer them something they do want see, hear and smell.

Smell: Naturally he ensures that neither he nor anyone around him has been smoking recently or handling oil or diesel. But he has also come up with fox lures based on ingredients including skunk glands, which bring inquisitive foxes in from thousands of yards.

Sound: Of course he does most of his foxing on foot so there's less noise like car doors banging. But he has also learned to squeak a dozen different noises that are attractive to foxes - a rabbit in distress, a hare or a mouse. His 'scritches' are so finely tuned that using a different brand of toothpaste stops him from doing them to his satisfaction.

And then there's sight. Pat asks everyone who goes out with him to wear Realtree camouflage and to stay still. And he has also produced any number of attractive lures, including a rabbit on a rotary device like a pigeon magnet. As he calls in charlie, his fox magnet brings the beast the last few yards, and diverts attention from wherever Pat is hiding, rifle or shotgun at the ready. Now he has found a new kind of camouflage. It won't get him out of Realtree but it is better - far better. Instead of trying to blend in to the countryside, he reasoned, how about using nature's ultimate camouflage: night-time.

The trouble is, night-time affects the hunter as much as the hunted. Pat's been interested in night vision ever since it was first available in the UK. He has bought some truly terrible NV scopes in the past and some good ones. But, scared by previous experiences of getting it wrong, he has not made the jump to the top flight of NV. Until now.

After extensive research, Pat has bought the Starlight Longbow. It's a specially designed 2.5-10x56 rifle scope with a 56mm objective lens. With interchangeable eyepieces, it can be used as a night vision rifle scope or as a regular optical daylight scope. And switching the eyepieces doesn't lose the weapons zero.

The scope fixes to the rifle with ordinary 30mm mounts. And, like any good scope, it is waterproof, fog-proof and shockproof. It has built-in objective focus to eliminate parallax, and comes with a variety of reticles. The Longbow is fitted with external target turrets graduated in quarter-MoA increments - one complete revolution of the drum spans 10ins. It is 338mm long and, when you add the night vision, that goes up to 353mm. Weight is 850 grams or, with night vision, 1.03kg. The night vision unit which attaches is available in generations 2+, 2+HP and 2+HyperGen. Pat has bought the best.

As you'd expect, the day Pat took delivery, he zeroed his Tikka T3 and went out that night to polish off any number of foxes he knew to be lamp shy. "It's amazingly effective," he says. "With the wind in the right direction and as long as you don't make any noise, you can call foxes almost to sit on your lap."

Night vision is not as simple to use as a scope. You will find it is hard on the eyes, like someone switching on a powerful torch in your eyes as you put your eye to the scope. In tests on soldiers using night vision goggles, The US army found it took them 35 minutes to properly regain their ordinary night vision after using electronic night vision. Pat is keen to point out that, as with a scope, you must not use your rifle to look round an area - however tempting that may be. He has a basic night vision monocular he uses for that. You also need to know your ground and your backstops. That didn't stop him shooting seven foxes in the first three days he had the unit - and they were all tricky blighters that had become lamp-shy. "There's a lot of people out there going round educating foxes," he says.

Another problem with night vision is that you don't know how far away your fox is. It is especially tricky with close range shots. The Longbow scope has parallax adjustment which can be used as a basic rangefinder up to 200 yards.

On Pat's latest video, Modern Foxing, there's a a scene where a (rich) friend of his who owns a Kite night vision set-up misses a fox that's almost in front of him. The poor bloke misjudged the range - "easy to do," says Pat. But Pat is used to night vision and all its foibles. What he's been after since the 1980's - and what he's got now - is a unit that lets him see clearly 200 yards (depending on conditions) into the gloom of a Dartmoor or Bodmin night. That's going to save a few lambs.

Now he's going to need a similarly expensive attachment for his video camera. Otherwise, his next DVD will be filmed in darkness.