Here is a option that few people know about! Picture is of a Leupold 25x power super compact spotter. At the time I thought it was brilliant. They took a 30-33mm x 50mm scope tube and made it a straight 25x with good rubber armour on the outside. It came with a fine crosshair in it, to you could show someone exactly where you were looking! It weights just 20oz. and is only 9.75 inches in length!
It's a great pack for me when going to the range bench with all my crap.
Well some people knew enough about them to buy 2 of them.
And they put them into aluminum brackets and made very good binoculars out of them.
Another very good and arguably even better one is the now vintage Bushnell Sentry 2 model 50 mm spotter.
Better from the standpoint that any 1" threaded eyepiece can be used in it. Which can improve it
Putting you current bino on a tripod is a good option, then using a small spotter to verify shooter/ no shooter would be a good solution. So glass with your 10s until you see a deer then switch to a the spotter to check the head gear. We pretty much hunt Coues deer this way, but we use 15-18 power binos as Coues deer can be very hard to spot because of their size and color. If I see one I want to look at closer I mount up the 12-40x60 gold ring. If you just want to buy a small spotter a pair of good 10s on a tripod would be plenty to see mulies, they are big and have a coloring that causes them to stand out some what. But, beyond about 500-600 yards horns might be hard to see unless you have really good eyes.
Over on the 24 hour Campfire site, there is a very good article which appeared a long time ago now.
It pertains to glassing for Coues deer, and goes on to compare the various binoculars then available for that use.
Of coarse today there have been other good ones brought to the market as well.
I would encourage anyone interested in glassing for game to read the article.
You will have to look for it, and you need first to go to that website.
Once there, go to the home page.
Then look for the (archives) section.
Scroll down that list till you come to the one entitled (big eyes).
There are several other good articles on optics as well listed there.
After reading that article now at least 10 years ago, one of the sets used in the testing part (Minox 15x58) was put on sale at Cameraland due to it being discontinued due to a new model being introduced. $500, so i bought a set of them.
I needed them like i needed another you know what, but i bought them anyway.
And along with some friends from a nearby camp we did our own comparison test from the yard of our camp where we can glass to over 1 mile.
We used the Minox, 15x56 Swaros, 15x56 Leica Geovids, and several smaller sets of 50 mm spotting scopes in brackets.
It was an enjoyable afternoon, and proved one thing,
You wont go wrong by owning any of them.
Including the small spotters i had about $300 invested in.
Read the article.
