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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Roy C" data-source="post: 3323930" data-attributes="member: 18798">Nice one Ron, hope it all goes well and you are pleased with your choice.I was talking to a neighbor this morning who was a birder many years ago and he still had his (20 year old) Kowa Prominar TSN-4 so he has let me loan it for a while to try it out. Its a 77mm scope with a 30x fixed eyepiece - at least it will give me an insight into whether or not 30x will be OK on the estuary. I have only tried it out from my garden so far but for a 20 year old scope it looks pretty good to me and I am amazed at how light it is.Its a straight scope and what struck me was just how high you had to have the tripod to get it to eye level - maybe a angled one would be better???. It only has a single focusing ring and I am thinking that one of these with  dual focuses rings  might be better for quickly locating the bird - what do you think? I wonder just how much better today's scopes are optically to this 20 year old scope?Another thing I will have to consider is a decent tripod head - I use a Gimbal with my Camera set-up but they are not much good for scopes. What head do you use??Anyway that's enough rambling from me and thanks once again for your thoughts Ron.</blockquote>