I came home the other day and the wife told me she had got me something. It was, according to her, a "Seek Thermal XR Extended Range Thermal Imager IOS." Of course my response was, "Huh?"

This device is quite interesting. Basically, it is a small infrared camera that attaches to your phone. It only weighs a couple of ounces and takes up little space.

I thought about it for a minute. I can certainly see some use for this. A good example would be trying to find a wounded animal at night. I especially thought of leopards. Scan your surroundings, if you detect nothing, move up a few more yards on the track and scan again.

We hooked it up. It was simple. We took it outside and could detect the heat signature of deer. We could see their every move even though we could not see the deer with our naked eyes.

This was only a couple of hundred dollars.

Interesting tech.
Maybe it will not be banned , but it could also be a boon to night time poachers, burglars, terrorists, US Military (probably had such tech for many years), and etc.

I like your ide of using it to locate wounded animal shot late in the day; many a wounded deer is lost when the light fades.

The deer thing has crossed my mind as well.

I borrowed one of those from a friend a while back, and was quite impressed with it!

Definitely an impressive price/performance ratio.

It obviously doesnt have the range of the handhelf FLIRs or other thermal scopes, but it is not bad and its 1/10th or less of the cost.

It actually also very useful for thermal scanning to check for loose connections on electrical panels...

The base technology has been around since at least the late 80s. Of course the site was huge compared to what your talking about.

We used to use the thermal image site in our Bradley to look at animals out on the practice ranges when we went to gunnery. You could easily count how many babies a sow had at several hundred yards. Hell at 100 you could see a deer take dump and see the pile of fresh litter afterward.

While the Seek TI is a neat gadget, you need something with higher resolution like the FLIR Scout II for hunting and surveillance. Especially if you're following up on wounded dangerous game at night.

Of course the FLIR systems are many times more expensive than the Seek. But it's amazing how much TI technology has dropped in price over the past few years.

Not sure about the SEEK, but, the other FLIR stuff, is too hard to export and re-import with the ITAR regulations and all.

Don't even think about leaving one of the other FLIR units behind as a tip or for use on the next trip. When you buy one, you usually have to sign a document not even allowing you to let a foreign national look thru it.

There is pretty good reason for the rules - it does risk lives of our warfighters if this technology or more specifically the hardware does fall into the bad guys hands. Our guys have a pretty strong advantage after dark now, as long we are the only guys on the battlefield with it.