Many years ago, I remember seeing a guy on arfcom who modified his Eotech hood with a small solar panel to help keep his batteries charged.

That was the first time that I had thought about that feature directly on the optic themselves.

As time went on, several other manufacturers have started using small panels on several of their models.

Holosun, Utg, Tasco, Trijicon, and a few others.

While the small panels on them don't keep your batteries charged, it does allow the dot to function during the day without the need for batteries. I don't believe the little panels are strong enough to recharge batteries, but rather strong enough to operate the little dot laser.

In wanting to satisfy my curiousity about how they work, I chose to purchase the least expensive model that I could find. This being the tasco unit. I have a couple of reasons for choosing it over the others, but the short answer is because it looked smaller, it had a dovetail mount that fit my shotgun that I wanted to mount it on that let me not have to drill and tap the receiver to install a picatinny rail, and it was cheaper than the others that I have seen.

This should get my feet wet how they function and help me decide if I wanted to move up to the UTG model later on. I admit, I like the fact that the utg runs off an AA battery rather than the standard 2032 coin style batteries that most dots use. I have purposely bought a lot of rechargeable AA's, rigged up small solar powered recharging stations for them, and they're readily available.

Long story short, I'll be doing a short review later and see if the cheap tasco will hold up to the 12 gauge and how it works.

Lots of pics and range report coming up later this week if anyone is interested and wants to follow along.

Here is the stock photo of the tasco. This is the dovetail version, though they also have a weaver/picatinny version too.



1x30mm
5 MOA Red Dot
Mfg Part# BKR3022SL
Price $35+ shipping

John A. wrote:Lots of pics and range report coming up later this week if anyone is interested and wants to follow along.

Heck yea! I'd be more surprised if the small solar panel generates enough to run the laser, but see no reason why it shouldn't be able (with good solar intensity and mostly time) to charge the batteries. Looking forward to this review.

I was able to mount and zero the optic. It sits a little higher over the bore than I expected, and a little larger too, but so far so good.



I appreciate that the mount clamp is the entire length of the optic, rather than how many other red dots just have two small tensioning tabs.



Sky is 100% overcast, plus a little more than an hour before dark when I was shooting. We're actually under a severe weather warning at the moment just to give an idea of how the sky looks.

Despite the fact, the reticle was plenty visible even without using the battery. I didn't expect as much considering the relatively low level of direct sunlight at this time.

I did turn the battery on it's brightest setting to check it and was brighter than the solar with little sun, but worked great nonetheless. And the letters are large.



If anything, the dot was about as bright as I would have had it if I would've turned the intensity level down anyway. That is good.

That brought me to a question as to whether if I were in shade looking out into a bright well lit background, would the reticle wash out?

I wasn't able to tell that today, but is something I'm going to find out when I get a chance to try that.

I also understand why the solar panel can't charge the battery now that I have it in hand.

It's because of the power/selector switch. You need to turn a knob to select battery or solar. That switch would prevent the panel from charging (or discharging) the battery and isolate them from each other depending on which you had selected at any given time.



It's supposed to have a 5 moa dot, but I'll be honest, it looks smaller. More like a 3 moa dot maybe. Since it's mounted on a shotgun and I'll never stretch it out to 100 yards, I know it won't cover 5 inches at the distances that I shoot, so maybe that's why it appears smaller at a glance but I thought it was worth mentioning.

I intend to paint it to match the rest of the gun after a couple of more trips out with it to make sure I don't have any issues that would need me to return it for a problem.

Anyway, here are a couple of shots after zero





And the worst out of the final 3 shots, would have still put meat on the table of course.

Looks like it's doing plenty adequate.

Yes, I think this will work well for us. And I'm glad too. I'm well satisified with the gun so far. Especially for the price point.

In the area and terrain that we hunt, we don't get many very long shots that we could take with a shotgun. Most everything is far less than 50 yards.

With the way it's patterning at 20 yards, I believe it won't have a problem going up to 50 but is something I want to test at every 5 yards starting at 30. I already know 20 and 25 yards will be more than adequate.

I have found that the current generation of Chinese products are much more hardy than previous offerings. The weaknesses were always battery connectors, switches and glazing. With foam packing in battery compartments, decent glue and fit/finish for the optics and the change to variable from step switches has made them, in my opinion, much more suitable for shotgun applications.
Previously, they would fall apart or fail on anything more powerful than a BB gun. Great review of the Tasco unit, I hope they show up this side of the pond

Yeah, there are a lot of imported optics that I steer clear of. Sadly though, there are only a couple of manufacturers that make optics stateside, and if I were a betting man, many of them are likely made from imported parts.

So far, I haven't had any issues, but it's still relatively new and I haven't had a lot of time behind it shooting shotguns yet.