I just got the rifle right before Christmas and haven't had an opportunity to reload for it yet, so I've been using the Hornady "Black" subsonic with 208 Amax, which shoots really well in my rifle (Kimber 84M Adirondack w/ 7 twist).
A couple other things about thermal sights...
Unlike traditional night vision, you can also use them during the daytime on a more limited basis because animals will produce enough contrast to see them through the scope, but it's helpful to use the light shield that comes with many of them to block sunlight from the side.
The most common way to zero the thermal sights is by using one of those hand warmer packs attached to a target. Or, you could freeze a water bottle, or heat up a piece of foil and attach to the target...any method for creating a big temp differential between your aiming point and the surrounding target works fine.
Battery life on most is around 4-5 hours of continuous use. This may not sound like much and isn't compared to, say, a typical red dot sight. However, these things are power hogs, so it's understandable. In reality, you don't really need to keep it on the entire time you're hunting since they power up pretty quickly. Most have a battery saver mode that will turn the unit off after a set amount of time to conserve batt life. Most of them use lithium batteries such as CR123's.
The FLIR Thermosights don't have user replaceable batteries; they have internal lithium battery packs like a laptop computer. They use a charging adapter to a mini USB port to recharge. At first, I didn't like the fact it only had an internal rechargeable batt pack and couldn't replace batteries in the field, but when you consider the short battery life, you can spend a lot of money on lithium batteries if you hunt a lot, so this feature saves me a lot of money in battery expense and I can always rig up an external battery pack with USB connection to extend battery life in the field if I ever need to. The battery life I'm getting will usually last me about 2 night hunts, since I don't have it turned on the entire time.
Last edited by RifleDude; 02/14/17.
