Paramount PMX love or hate

[MarkA]

Hi guys,

We all know PMX is sexy at lease appears to be. Is it as good under the stars as on the picture. Do you have any issues eg. tracking, backlash, communication with the company etc. Can you please share your thoughts.

Regards
Mark

:thanx:

[cfranks]

When the rain and/or clouds finally cleared, I set mine up ready to do all the initial alignments and tuning. My gear turned out to be too heavy for the pair of counterweights supplied. Bummer! :( I have made an additional weight but it has been cloudy or very windy since. Wednesday promises to be clear so I can try again. Still, I managed to polish the MX a couple of times. :thumbsup:

Charles

[strongmanmike]

:lol: :thumbsup:

[Moon]

I'm told it's okay to give them a hug every now and then too.:thumbsup:
James

[MarkA]

Thank you Charles for your response I know exactly what I would say in situation like this. You right resourcefulness and patience is the key. Judging by the number of visitors looking this thread few more people is sort of interested in this subject.


Thanks to Michael and James we got another smile on our faces.
No stress no pressure, the weather will change, polishing and hugging will not hurt.


Mark

[Paul Haese]

I don't own one but I do have a PME. If these smaller mounts are anything like the PME, then they will be fantastic. Once I got mine working (it had a problem not manufacturer related, see this thread (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=74742)if you like), it just points where you want to go. It guides easily and I almost never get a bad subs. I can check focus on another star and come back to the same position (within a few pixels). In other words it does what you expect it to do. That is what you get with these mounts.

I would not be concerned that this is a new mount. It is a mount from Software Bisque. It will work really well, no doubt.:)

[cventer]

I have now had 3 decent nights playing around with my Paramount MX so thought I would post my impressions.

To set the scene I have owned numerous mounts over the years, LX90, Vixen GPDX, Losmandy G-11, Mountain Instruments MI-250.

The MX is by far the easiest and most pleasurable experience I have had to date with any mount. You set it up and it just plain works. No tweaking, tuning, fiddling that have come with nearly every mount I have owned.

The build quality is outstanding. Fully loaded the ALT/AZ adjustment for polar alignment is smooth and repeatable. The clutch system on the RA and DEC axis is brilliant. The ability to move from free rotation for balance, to locked to engaged with the twist of a knob makes balancing your equipment, and loading new equipment a pleasure.

The through the mount cabling, built in USB hub and power on the versa plate makes keeping everything neat and makes worrying about cable snagging a thing of the past.

The motors are smooth and very quiet and have virtually no detectable backlash. The joystick/hand control that comes with it is a work of art. Made from one machined hunk of metal it feels solid in your hand and makes manual pointing and visual observing with the scope a dream. The ability to change slew rates that are user definable allows you to set rates you are comfortable with. For observing the moon and surfing the limbs with the joystick that fits into your thumb is a treat and feels very natural.

The mount has lots of what I call idiot proof features that won’t allow it to harm itself. Motors and gear boxes are solidly shielded and mean you won’t damage them accidentally in transport or by doing something silly like taking your scope or counterweights off. Even if you do this and the gears are engaged they have a ratchet slipping mechanism that means they wont destroy your bearings or alignment of works to wheels.

Software integration is 2nd to none. The Sky X makes controlling this a breeze. The camera add on and T-Point add on that comes with the mount make automatic plate solving for synchronisation and pointing runs a very trivial matter.

The mount has several features to enable easy polar alignment. Because the mount is self homing you can get within 5 minutes polar alignment very quickly by homing mount then slewing to a bright star. You just then manually adjust azimuth and alt of the mount till star is centred and that puts you close. An awesome feature for portable setups. After this initial alignment you can then quickly create a 20 – 25 pointing run in the T-Point add on This takes around 5 – 6 minutes from begging to end for a 25 point run. After this you ask T-Point to generate a super model and then the software gives you a polar alignment report.

This report tells you exactly how many turns of the azimuth and Altitude adjustment knobs are needed to point to the refracted pole. I LOVE this feature. The alt and az knobs have graduated etched tics. Each one is 1 arc minute. The report says thinks like Loosen West and Tighten East Azimuth knob 2.5 arc min. This means turn it 2.5 tics.

2 – 3 iterations of this. I.e. do a 5 min pointing run 2 – 3 times and the report will tell you don’t adjust anything pointing is good enough.

Once Polar alignment was done the next task was to build a full pointing model. After just 50 points I had pointing being reported as accurate to 11.1 Arc Secs. This was good enough for my needs at this time. Although since I added another 150 points to this model.

Next up was tracking test. Without PE I took a series of 30 sec and 1 min shots of 47 TUC unguided at 1470mm focal length. Perfectly round stars on both 30 and 1 min shots without Pro Track feature turned on. I was very happy with this.

Next up was a real imaging run with guiding. Using PHD an Orion Starshoot guider and a 50mm finder scope I got the mount calibrated. Needed to use 2400ms pulses to get it to move the 25 pixels in each direction.

Once calibration was done guiding locked on and was very smooth. My RMS in PHD hovered at around .22 with a nice smooth guiding graph and no spikes. 10 min Subs all showed lovely round stars even with a decent wind blowing.

In short I cannot ask for anything more than what this mount is delivering so far. Easy to setup, great software, easy to use and great performance right out the box.

My next job to to program PE and do a big enough pointing model to test out the Pro Track feature. Will report back when this is done....


Cheers
Chris

Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with Software Bisque. Even though this reads like and advertisement, I am just a happy customer. :D:D:D

[Paul Haese]

Yep best mounts getting around. I am fully converted myself. SB makes the best gear. Well except for their software (The sky excluded).

[frolinmod]

1) Please measure your PE to see if it's worth bothering to lower further and if it is, then program it and re-measure it. This is done with ProTrack turned OFF. Note that if if PE doubles, then you've clicked on the box that indicates you're on the the other side of the meridian, so change that to be the other way, re-program it and re-measure it. It should decrease this time.

2) 150 points if well distributed over the sky should be enough for ProTrack to shine, so you might want to compare how well your tracking is working with ProTrack turned off to with having it turned on and see if you can notice any difference. If your model indicates you have any significant amount of flexure or other nastiness in the system, then you should notice a difference (improvement).

[gregbradley]

I found at 2958mm focal length I needed the PEC to go the last bit to get good round stars. At shorter focal lengths no doubt that is a bit easier.

I received an email saying my PMX is shipping so I should have it next week.

Greg.

[Logieberra]

Hey guys, can someone please confirm the counterweight shaft diameter of the PMX. Cheers, Logan.
P.S. Chris I noticed your poor glo heli in the background of your observatory, same deal here, my Align Trex collects dust these days!

[frolinmod]

The counterweight shaft diameter for ALL Paramounts from the original GT-1100 in 1998 to the MX today is 1.5 inches. Software Bisque sell 20lb counterweights. PlaneWave Instruments sell 40lb counterweights. You'll often find used counterweights for a lower cost on Astromart. They're stainless steel, so they keep well over the years needing only a little touch-up with Naval Jelly perhaps once in ten years even if left outside to the elements. (Don't ask how I know this.)

[Logieberra]

Thanks Frolin, lots of good info there. Cheers, Logan.

[cventer]

What is Naval Jelly ?

[frolinmod]

It's Phosphoric Acid formulated as a green jelly that looks like snot.

http://images.lowes.com/product/converted/079340/079340802773lg.jpg

I buy it branded as LOCTITE Naval Jelly Rust Dissolver, a picture of the bottle referenced above. It is very effective. Some people say they use Coca Cola, but I can't vouch for the effectiveness of that!

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphoric_acid:

Phosphoric acid may be used as a "rust converter", by direct application to rusted iron, steel tools, or surfaces. The phosphoric acid converts reddish-brown iron(III) oxide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron%28III%29_oxide), Fe2O3 (rust (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust)) to black ferric phosphate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron%28III%29_phosphate), FePO4.

"Rust converter" is sometimes a greenish liquid suitable for dipping (in the same sort of acid bath as is used for pickling metal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickling_%28metal%29)), but it is more often formulated as a gel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel), commonly called naval jelly. It is sometimes sold under other names, such as "rust remover" or "rust killer". As a thick gel, it may be applied to sloping, vertical, or even overhead surfaces.

After treatment, the black ferric-phosphate coating can be scrubbed off, leaving a fresh metal surface. Multiple applications of phosphoric acid may be required to remove all rust. The black phosphate coating can also be left in place, where it will provide moderate further corrosion resistance (such protection is also provided by the superficially similar Parkerizing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkerize) and blued (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluing_%28steel%29) electrochemical conversion coating (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_coating) processes).