Now he's talking about some job he was supposedly offered to collect trade secrets and sell them to his friend who works in the stock market.
He's off his fucking rocker.
Also apparently if I tell anyone he'll slit my throat. Pls keep it a secret.
I need to save at least six thousand dollars so I can put together my own ANVIS 9 Dual Tube NVG
That sounds tacticool.
How do you build your own?
First you need to get a housing, which is by far the hardest part. This includes basically all the electronic controls, the battery compartment or power equipment and the attachment points for all the rest of the components.
Next, you need suitable "optics" which is a simple term for the eyepiece, which has fine focal adjustments to suit your eye, and the objective lens, which is more complicated, but in general has rough focal adjustment to change your field of vision more noticeably. Both of these parts are fairly expensive, as they need to have specific attachment threads to screw onto the housing safely and provide an airtight seal as well.
Finally, skipping all the electronic controls that are native to the housing group, you need image intensifier tubes, photocathodes, or just "tubes". They are very expensive, and they are sold usually based on the amount of "blemishes" they have on the tube themselves. eBay is the only real place to buy them from, unless you know someone who is a "dealer" (but this is not entirely accurate. It's not some kind of black market. These things are entirely legal, although ITAR restricted for importation).
Apparently blemishes are the result of uneven film application and other coating processes. They cannot be corrected, because the tube is a sealed unit and almost no one actually has the ability to fix these things. You can pop them open and see what's in them, but at that point, moisture and debris ruin any of the parts that might have been working fine. When you look through the powered tube, a blemish is a black spot on the image. If you really don't mind these blemishes, you can acquire tubes fairly easily and cheaply, and build decent night vision setups for under two thousand dollars (single tube).
At this point, it's cheaper to just pay someone to setup your optic for you, but if you are intent on doing it yourself, you will need a variety of specific tools and accessories, not to mention you have to get it Nitrogen Purged. Dual Tubes makes everything complicated. They are not cheap, and they never will be cheap. If you just want to build a simple PVS-14 monocular, you can acquire all the parts besides the Tube for 950, and then just buy a cheap blemish tube on ebay for about seven hundred dollars and you have a sub 2000$ NVD. I have messed around with the PVS-14 plenty, and although I am not interested in making one, I think it's by far a more versatile and useful device than a dual tube NVD like PVS-15s or ANVIS setups.
