Check out the zy-t08 from fasttech for a more compact thrower.
I should have thought on and taken that too. I’ll check it against the other two if you wish tonight.
You need a SF Gladiator with the MPP1 head. It has the throw, the simple single mode and the heft to do some serious hammering 
It has the pros of a real thrower combined with the pros of a 3D maglite….
another option is a few wall outlet timers with small lamps plugged into them. Then you can set them up in different rooms and switch them on when you go out. Move them around so that they don’t fall into any observable pattern. That and a couple of motion detector lights would help. Also consider organising some evening walks with your neighbours - doesn’t have to be anything armed and vigilante obviously, but just having people around at random times will reduce the risk that thieves will come back to your neighbourhood at all. You’ll also get to know your neighbours better and get some exercise at the same time 
I changed my mind and bought the Defiant 3C so I could have a light immediately. I don’t like the size at all. There’s no way to carry it. It’s awkward in the Harries technique carry with a handgun. Still, it can sit by the door and be used if a car pulls up the gate. I’ll buy a more practical thrower later.
The 60 LED Solar motion sensor works and is a good outdoor light, but it doesn’t put out enough light for a tactical situation like this. The gate has reflectors on it and they throw back so much light when someone pulls up that the additional light from the LED motion sensor is dwarfed by comparison. It doesn’t have the massive light of say a couple of 150W halogen floods. I’ll use it closer to the house. The Skylink motion sensor alert hasn’t arrived yet. I’ve rearranged my work desk so I can see the gate at all times. Thanks for all the suggestions.
These are great
i have one under my carport and it works well for lighting at night when there is motion
The Skylink arrrived a couple of days ago. I’ve installed it by the gate and mounted the receiver in the line of sight. It’s about 350 feet away and it works every time. Except… sometimes when a car goes by on the highway, it sets off the alert even though it is mounted to only pick up a car after a car turns into the drive and the hood is a good 15 feet off the highway.
It rarely happens, but it seems that the cause is hot exhaust gases blowing off the road to the point that it gets picked up by the motion sensor. At least my neighbor’s dog doesn’t set it off.
All in all, I’m pleased that the signal will reach my house. One annoyance is that the alert beeps 12 times when set off… 12 times. Really? Like, hello, don’t you think we’ve figured it out by 3 or 4 beeps?
The Home Depot Defiant 3C lights up the driveway nicely from 350 feet away.
Glad the 3c is working for you. I received a smallsun zy-t08 from fasttech last week, with no mods and fully charged sanyo cells recieved at the same time it pulled 3a at the tail. This is definitely a portable thrower you could consider for walking about your property with, the 3c though is extremely impressive to me for its cost and that you could just go out and get one, I wish we had those kind of options over here.
I also live in a remote place. I have a half mile driveway. For the last 5 years I’ve used a Dakota Alert MAPS M538-BS Kit Long Range Driveway Alarm. Cost about $300USD. It is a metal detector with a probe you bury next to the road. It will detect a motorcycle but not a bicycle. You can adjust the sensitivity if it needs to be by a main road. No false alarms like you get with infrared detectors that detect every little animal plus wind moving branches. We are having problems with mountain lions so we use the Dakota infrared censers for that. The MURS frequency transmitter with this unit will send a mile or more to the base receiver. It has worked flawlessly. I have been using driveway alarms for 30 years and this one is the best I have seen.
I have had great fun with a PC900 RECONYX™ Professional series game camera. $650USD. This may be the only game camera that uses a flash at night that you can’t see. This eliminates the tell-tale red glow common to other infrared cameras. This is the camera that most wildlife researchers use because you really can’t tell when you’ve been shot. Good for license plates that are 60 feet or closer.
Cars are easy for it to detect. I have had this camera working every day for 4 years. It’s so much fun to see what moves across my 60 acres.
I didn’t read through the whole thread by if you want a cheap and efficient effect get those indoor closet sensor lights from IKEA. They run on 3 AAs basically forever and if you install them right they should do the job of at least shining a tiny little bit of light everytime somebody moves. The output is NOT MUCH but the costs are LOW. (under 9 bucks for a 3-4 pack, I don’t remember)
any idea if that thing is moddable? Even a modest increase in output from an emitter swap could make that light very attractive to me.
I’ve been looking at this model, it seems to be a lot brighter.