I got into it this fall. Agreed you pretty much have to order from the US and take the hit if you want to go with purpose built gear. I will likely get there, but for starters I wanted to try it out without major investment. I showed the videos to a friend of mine who is a tactical officer who does a lot of vertical rescue type stuff and also and obsessed rock climber. He and I came up with a less expensive and safer DIY option and I had a lot of fun with it. I ended up killing my deer from a conventional stand, but I had a lot of fun and a lot of comfortable sits in my saddle. I used tubular webbing and climbing rope to make my brace and tether, and a Black Diamond bosuns chair as my “saddle”. I wore my regular climbing harness at first, then a light rock climbing harness, as a backup fall arrest harness and for climbing with a linesman’s belt. The harness makes a fully redundant fall arrest system with its own tether (separate from the harness brace and tether), which some might see as overkill but when it comes to that I follow a “one is none and two is one” philosophy when it comes to safety when climbing trees with sharp objects or explosives! LOL My secondary fall arrest tether was dyneema webbing loop - light and strong and less bulky than climbing rope. I didn’t use a platform but one would be good. Options can be fairly expensive so for this year I just went without. I climbed regular tree sticks and then screwed two steps in on either side of the tree slightly above the top step to stand on/brace against. I used good Kunys kneepads for “sitting”.
I learned a lot - got better and better at it every hunt. It has pros and cons for sure. One thing is that you’ll notice that a lot of the videos are dudes in Georgia in shorts and t-shirts! It’s a different ball game in a snowstorm on the 14th of December in Nova Scotia! Gloves, frozen hands, full body shakes all make for a very different experience coming down at the end of a five hour hang! That’s one of the reasons I used redundant safety gear to make sure that a fall was basically impossible. Not sweating your nuts off getting up the tree and settled in is a challenge too. Avoiding noise of sticks or whatever you are climbing with is of course a challenge as always. Takes practice and refinement, like anything, as does shooting a bow from the saddle (and to a lesser degree, a rifle).
Big plus is changing your setup to respond to wind conditions or deer sign, and not leaving stuff in the woods to worry about getting ripped off or attracting notice of other land users/hunters.
