|
The best thing I ever did was to put one full setup together, zip tie a powerboard and all the adapters etc to the mount legs, and get some caster wheels so I could wheel it in and out while all set up. I have a set position marked on my deck for each tripod leg so I can get it close to a polar alignment (which is then quickly nailed down in sharpcap). This reduced my setup time from, say, 45 mins to 5 mins. It let me just wheel it out when things looked OK, and in doing so I then used my rig consistently every other night for a few weeks. In those few weeks I learnt more than I had since I started a few years ago. Now I know it all works, so just have to wait for the moon to go away again.
It isn't that inspiring to think "I'm going to spend 1.5 hours in set up and pack up time, just to get my autofocus working", but if you're straight to working on your next issue within 10 minutes it gets a lot more tolerable (ie no three month breaks from the hobby because you spent night after night trying to get the one issue resolved).
I'll see if I can take some pictures so you can see what I mean.
|