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Hi,
Gary Kopff the owner of Wildcard Innovations which makes the Argo Navis system actually lives in Sydneys Northern Suburbs and has the units made at Silverwater. Gary plans to join the forum in the next few days when he has some time. I have used Argo Navis for a couple of years and find it superb but the fact that it is locally owned and produced is priceless. 3 days before SPSP I had a brand new Duracell Ultra battery leak through my Argo navis unit. I dropped the unit off to Gary and picked it up the night before the SPSP completely repaired and ready for action at SPSP, no chance of that with a US made Sky Commander, get it back in 2 months maybe not 2 days.
In respect of the units themselves Sky Commander is based on the Tangent Instruments System from the mid 1980's. Argo Navis is from the late 1990's and is being improved all the time. The next ****FREE**** firmware upgrade for Argo Navis due to be released very soon will include anumber of enhancements which will take it light years ahead of the competition including a feature to calculate mount errors and compensate for them to improve pointing accuary on inaccurate mounts.
In addition to that Argo Navis already has numerous features not available on Sky Commander.
IMO Argo Navis is clearly the best system available but its not cheap, then again the best of anything usually isn't.
And yes Argo Navis now comes with 10,000 step encoders as opposed to the older 8,192 step encoders but in a lot of cases this is academic, as the accuracy with the 8,192 step encoders is more than good enough for me. It puts everything into a 10mm eyepiece regardless of which part of the sky I am pointing and you can't ask for any better than that.
Clear Skies
John Bambury
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