How well behaved is your EQ6Pro mount?

[bmitchell82]

So im trying to quantify my polishing of the white Stallion, back in the dark days where that gawd awful crunching and grinding sound of the EQ6 was perfectly normal. I had no idea what PE was and guiding was achieved by clicking Siderial tracking.

My question to owners out there of these Stallions unpolished or not is what is your current mount performance? how rowdy is it? PE measurements? Modifications?

I measured my mount last night and to my absolute delight it proforms extremely well and goes along way to explaining the round stars i quite frequently observe in my images.

So.

EQ6Pro - Purchased New
Age - Feb 2009 2 years old nearly 3 now
Modifications - Upsized Saddle
Work done - Complete strip down, greased up with Super lube PTFE, shimming for better mesh of the RA worm gear/wheel, adjustment of all worm meshings for minimal backlash in RA and virtually no backlash in DEC
Normal loading - About 23-25 kgs
Normal CW loading - 22kgs

PE measured at 1200mm FL (254 Newt AG) QHY9 @ 0.93 seconds of arc per pixel

Length of measurement: 4 worm cycles approximately 600 data points.
Ambient conditions Seeing 5-6/10 and a slight breeze.
PE +6.5 -5.3
Total PE 11.8 seconds of arc Pk to Pk
This is not jittery its a smooth transition.

Tonight I will take a screen dump of the graph to add in.

Hopefully this can be a good thread that isn't disjointed to help people gauge their mount and getting it working the way it should. We all know that the PE in these things is not that of a Ovision tuned G11, or a PME or a AP1200 GTO but at 1500 dollars and cheaper second hand they are a massive step into the field of AP for a modest price. So Naysayers need not open their mouth! :)

[Zaps]

What a bizarre post.

[bmitchell82]

Why is it a bizzar post mate? This is an equipment discussions part of the forum is it not? why not discuss a mount that alot of us use?

[Poita]

I am about to strip down an older EQ6PRO, so in the interests of shared information, I'll run a set of numbers before and after so we can see what difference it makes on this particular mount.

What method and software did you use to measure your mount? I'd like to use the same process so we can compare numbers in a useful fashion.

[bmitchell82]

I grabbed the CCDWare PEMPro 60 day trial software.

EQMod was the interface with ASCOM 6 and MaximDL was the capture software. Mount aligned with Alignmaster pro to approximately 1 arc min accuracy (wasn't going to get to picky for a quick setup).

[kinetic]

Relax mate,

your exuberance and passion for nutting out your gear is obviously
lost on some of us :)

I enjoy reading your progress and admire your openess to actually
share tips etc. Many hold this stuff back from others.

I wouldn't get too upset.
I would , however, like an explanation of why you put poultry (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showpost.php?p=786531&postcount=60) on your
mount?...:P :D

Steve

[Grahame]

:lol:

[bmitchell82]

I don't need to hide what i do Steve, as i have lernt that even if you tell some people exactly what to do show them hands on what to do they will never match your level of experience or the quality of your work due to the fact that you where smart enough to figure it out and they wernt! Plus for those of us that are technical twinkle fingers sharing information can sometimes peak your thoughts and figure something that you never thought of. We all learn and grow our knowledge base!

Well steve :D you see :D when people say to me how the !!!! did you do that i just go I sacrificed a chicken, chickens don't run wild sooooo..... I have some Poultry strapped in just in case of emergency!

People miss understand me for getting angry Grahame knows me and i far from get angry at little bits like that. I do how ever get frustrated :) but thats not for this site! :D

[Poita]

I'm looking to upgrade the saddle from the standard vixen as well.

I never see the point in being a knowledge horde, if someone can do a better job than me by standing on the shoulders of what I've done, then good on them!

[Zaps]

Well now that you've edited out pretty much all of the bizarre stuff from your post, it's a lot less bizarre. :D ;)

[bmitchell82]

Zaps not many get my quirky sense of humor :) so its all good my friend

[ReaPerMan]

I bought my EQ6 from Grahame, second hand and it had I was assured, served him very well! As a newby I thought the Robocop like sounds that they made were an indication of the high tech nature of the beast :D Brendan then asked my why I was putting up with that God awful noise and not doing anything about it? He then very generously offered to put it out of its misery and attacked it with a screwdriver! I have to say that it is now almost silent and it purrs rather than sounding like a football rattle.. Also all slop is now gone and it is sooo much better for it. I for one will try to obtain a set of figures so that I can see how it compairs to a 'normal' out of the box unit.

Paul

[bert]

With mine the noise comes and goes. Especially the dec axis.

Can't complain about performance. I think they are a great mount for the bucks.

Brett

[RobF]

I just wish you lived over here Brendan - I'd happily pay you strip my mount down. One day I'll work up the guts to try and tune it, but not now my camera is going again and I'm over-optimistically praying for some clear nights during dec hols :)

I think these sorts of threads are great for people looking to get max bang for buck from their Synta mount. Watching with interest.

[ballaratdragons]

I have an old black EQ6 that I bought from Houghy about 5 years ago.

It is an absolutely fantastic mount!
Noise? Mine is practically silent when slewing.

I have never done any measurements of PE or accuracies but it has exact GoTo's every time.
Objects land in or near centre of the FOV and always have.
It Guides beautifully with Guidemaster guiding corrections always under .5 in RA and Dec!!!
(in Guidemaster anything under 1.0 is supposed to be excellent)

Houghy had the mount supercharged by Roger in Melbourne.
I'm not quite sure what one of Roger's supercharge's involves but I have heard that it involves far better bearings to start with.

It may be an old Black model, it may have the old decrepit v2.5a Hand Controller (non-flash upgradable), but in 5 years of Astrophotography and now 'Live' Astrocasts it has NEVER let me down.

I have no desire to replace it. It works nicely. :thumbsup:

Here's the old girl: http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/attachments/4827999-2-cams-2-scopes-close-up.jpg

[bmitchell82]

I have found that 90% of the noise actually comes from the transfer gear between the gears on the motor itself!

here (http://brendanmitchell.net/?page_id=10&wppa-album=15&wppa-photo=157&wppa-occur=1) is my PE graph if anybody would like to look at it.

[alistairsam]

Hi Brendan,

nice work. that curve looks pretty smooth unlike the jittery ones I've seen. I know its mostly because of your tuning, but could it also be because of positive loading?
I keep reading about the noise of these mounts and references to coffee grinders and end user improvements, how come the manufacturers don't incorporate these improvements? Is it mass produced?
I don't have the mount but am always keen to read up on performance improvements.
without going into details, hypothetically, would class 5 bearings or if possible, 7, help? not sure if preloading is possible here.

[bmitchell82]

The bearings in that mount are HUGE. There is a taper bearing there that centers it nicely. maybe you could get a little bit out of them but cost vs benifit they fail epically.

The only way you will improve the PE of these mounts is to improve the worm wheel and gear precision. Apart from making sure its as well adjusted as you possibly can get it what you see on that PE graph you wont get much more out of it.

Positive loading I doubt it as i balance with no bias as every time i have done it my guiding goes wayward big time. In saying that I the balancing technique i employ is due to the fact that my axis are not free flowing like that of a G11, but yeah and at the end of the day it would only follow the PE even better and make it worse so to speak.

Oh and some information on the graph, each one of the sections is a 1 minute block. so the PE isn't fast moving which allows the guider to keep up.

Does anybody know exactly how to employ the PEC to the eqmod, because every time i tried it followed PEC curve.... Inverted not inverted nothing mud skippa :(

[rider]

I upgraded from a fairly quiet eq5pro in early 2010. I was astounded at how silent the neq6pro is straight out of the box.
It points at what I ask it to, tracks properly and carries a modded 12 inch Newt with a lot of toys strapped to it, like its a made of feathers.
The only mods I've made are a long stainless counterweight bar, a set of lower spreaders for the legs, and the skyscan-tour handpiece.
Ive had 4 SW EQ mounts and they've all been good buys.

[Terry B]

I recently sold my EQ6pro and replaced it with a Tak NJP.
The tak is a bit more noisy but is much more solid. The EQ6 did have a fair bit of periodic error but I could always guide it out using guidemaster. I never bothered stripping it apart as it was good enough for what I used as is. All in all it was a good mount. The Tak is lots better but you would expect it to be for the cost.

[Poita]

I'm just waiting for the rain to stop, but it is forecast for another two days.

Bloody farmers and their grinnin'

[Chancellor]

After some horrible movements in the mount and some nice crunching sounds, I am FINALLY going to attack mine with a screwdriver today.

I am not bothering with pre-tune results, but http://completelyserious.com/pics/mountts/IMG_4672.JPG should give you a rough idea of how bad the movements are. (This is a guided shot, while tracking the stars will occasionally jump around in the eyepiece).

Fingers crossed it doesn't go completely wrong..

[bmitchell82]

yeah thats pretty shocking! you should see a massive difference once you have it all tuned up properly!

[Terry B]

I never had anything that bad. An example is here
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=99783&d=1314621407
This was taken at 1800mm fl with 120 sec and 300 sec exposures. My guideing is a guide scope using 0.3 sec exposures and guidemaster. The pic isn't anything to write home about but certainly shows nice round stars.

[Osirisra]

did you set the gain on the PEC to 1 after loading the file?

[Terry B]

I tried it also but gave up as it seems to have limited use. It needs to use the pulse drive to record it and I always used the direct connection to the mount from my guider. Pulse guide was much more flakey than the direct connection.
If you are guideing anyway the PE will guide out.

[bmitchell82]

Ill have to have a look at that Osiris, I believe that its following the PEC map because I wanted to see how well it did with the PEC in place while i recored the new map. but it followed the PEC graph almost to the letter which is odd and at the end of the day the PE was far worse!

I havn't run with PEC to this day so i know it works without it but if i can make it work better then why not try :)

[Osirisra]

It will follow the PEC but not do anything if the gain is off. Set to 1 is 1to1 ratio of correction. I gather ya used PECPrep to create the file for eqmod.

[bmitchell82]

What i mean by it follows the PEC, it actually follows the PEC curve so when the pec is going down its going down when its up its going up and its doing it nigh on perfectly

Ill check the 1 for 1 thing because i know that eqmod allows for that kind of adjustment. Thanks for the update on that

[RobF]

I'm pretty sure PECPrep is the only (native) EQMOD solution that will automatically sync the PEC with your steppers Brendan. If you use any other program you have to click the TimeStamp button on the EQMOD driver at the same time you stop recording data. This presumeably writes data somewhere to show where your steppers were at that moment so that when you next load up your PEC it will start at the right point. I've done this when I recorded my PE data via Maxim and it worked ok.

Perhaps you just happened to be roughly half a cycle out of step when you fired it up?

[stevous67]

Hi Brendan,

Nicely introduced thread with more than sufficient information to start. Bizarre? Hmmmm.

I have a mothballed EQ6 which I'll never sell because of it's past performance.

Cheers

Steve

[Ausrock]

Terry,

Thanks for that post, I had been going to PM you regarding the EQ6 and what, if any, work had been done to it. Last night was it's first "real" use since I got it and due to our location, I spent a lot of time trying (unsuccesfully) to get it aligned. Unfortunately, Crux is currently dissapearing behind a ridge fairly early AND even with a dew shield, I found I'm going to have to get some heaters for my C9.25.

Oh, and I hate city lights.............can't wait to get a weekend at our place up the coast.

Chris

[ballaratdragons]

Something I forgot to mention, now that I am doing Video Astronomy, my EQ6 is so good I don't even use guiding any more.
I only go to a maximum of about 2 minutes with the faintest of objects, but most objects I integrate the live video around the 5 to 15 seconds mark. No real need for guiding at that length of integration.
And being live video no-one worries about any movement anyway as it is expected :lol:
In fact if it does show any movement it just proves that it is 'live' :lol:

[Poita]

is that with the mallincam extreme? I was wondering how long the integration times were.
Hopefully I'll get to give my EQ6 a run tonight.

[bmitchell82]

Steve I could almost garantee that with the right adjustments your poor proforming EQ6 would proform just fine. I remember doing PE run on my mount in the dark old days and it was somewhere about 25 arc seconds Pk-Pk with soul destroying backlash and a crunching sound that can only be likend to a learner driver on their first crack at changing gears.!



Rob, you could be spot on the fazhissle there. but im not really fussed as its proforming just outside losmandy G11 standard specs... +-5 arc seconds and my guiding at 1200mm FL sits nicely within +-.5 pixels. Happy days mate!

[Peter.M]

I had a bit of a funny night tonight, Set out to use alignmaster for the first time and then after decided to do some helix images. I actually left my focusing mask on the scope for all of my 10 minute subs.........:screwy: So my images were of the helix nebula and spikey stars.

I did manage to get a screen cap of my tracking though. Remember that I use a finder guider so small deviation in the graph is more movement than people guiding at longer FL

Oh and this is on my HEQ5 pro

[ballaratdragons]

Peter, yes that is with the Xtreme.
The Xtreme has exposure and integration times from 1/12,000th of a second up to 99 hours 59 minutes and 59 seconds :thumbsup:

It can be used as a Lunar/Planetary camera, a Live AstroVideo camera, or a CCD imager. Choose which one at the click of a mouse :)

[bmitchell82]

Yeah finder guiders don't give really any representation :D thats how mine used to look hehehe. Bugger on the Focus mask thats just sadening!

[bmitchell82]

Took a little screen dump of my imaging session on sat night to show what kind of stars i guide on before i did the needed adjustments to bring the guider into focus (they are still little sausages), the genreal guiding graph, and a 900 second (15min) shot looks like. Hope you guys find it useful

Here (http://brendanmitchell.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/banana-star.jpg), Here (http://brendanmitchell.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/NGC55-Guiding.jpg), Here (http://brendanmitchell.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/NGC55-001L-900sec-Lum.jpg)

Edit: Just to give you an idea of the guiding in Here number three, the graph scale is 6 minutes in length and +-0.5 pixels then just under that it shows the numerical values of the guiding adjustment. If your so inclined my pixel scale is 0.93 seconds of arc per pixel so times the error by the pixel scale and thats the arc second error. And generally that is well below the seeing limits.

[Poita]

What are those dark donuts?

[steve000]

If anyone wants to do a comparison test theirs vs a stock one, id be happy to accomodate.

Mine is just over 1 year old, lightly used and often moves 20+kg.

If you are in the brisbane/west area let me know.

[bmitchell82]

Dust bunnies :D thats another reason for taking flats! :)

[jenchris]

Poita Wrote


That's almost sounding a little sexist - foxy mount and saddles ! phew.

I find the thread fascinating and very informative even if the use of words is a little clumsy at times.