Quote:
Originally Posted by The_bluester
Another advantage of the EQ6-R over the lower cost EQ6 and the EQ5 variants is the drive system. The stepper motors that drive the mounts run far too fast to drive the mount, so they have two stages of reduction drive. The cheaper EQ6 versions have a reduction gearbox which drives the worm gear, and the worm drives a ring gear which is what drives the axis. The EQ6-R and the AZEQ6 have a pulley and belt reduction drive between the stepper motors and the worm gear, the AZEQ5 may have a belt as well.
The advantage of the belt drive is that the reduction gearboxes tend to introduce much more complex periodic error into the RA drive which while it can be done, is harder to guide out. But they can also introduce backlash which is difficult to get rid of. That does not matter much in RA but in declination it can make guiding tricky and less effective.
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Backlash although still evident in the EQ6-R can be reduced or “tuned” out by adjusting the belt tension on your RA and DEC axis pulley drives and adjusting your worm gear tension. I’ve done both adjustments in approx 20 minutes with Allen keys and a Philips head screw driver, a very simple procedure. The EQ6-R is designed so the “average Joe” can carry out these adjustments without stripping down the whole mount like some of the earlier gear driven models. The results show in your guiding , almost zero backlash on Dec most nights