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I bought a regulated AC DC converter at Bintel many moons ago. They don’t have it in their line up anymore but it works a Charme and has never failed me. It has a cooling fan and a easy access fuse. Two screw connections at the front and a cable with with both wires lugged off for the screw terminal on one side and a cigarette lighter port on the other. From there I plugged in a splitter to get two cigarette lighter outlets - one for the mount, one for the dew heater. The laptop runs of mains power via its own power cable with converter. It’s best to keep things separate. The dew heater is fine as it’s a static load. The mount doesn’t like to be connected with other electronic items on the same power source. The Bintel converter provides slightly more than 12V so that the voltage stays above 12V when the motors kick in for a slew and suddenly start drawing over 2Amp, which cheap converters can’t handle. If the voltage to the mount drops below 12V, the mount will beep and start behaving erratic or **** down. I can only recommend over sizing the power supply for this reason. Try to get the best cigarette outlets money can buy you as they are notorious for loosing spring strength internally, which cause loose connections. Loose connections that fail completely are fine but if it’s on off, the mount will hurt and you may see burn marks in the outlet. Cable diameters should be minimum 2sqare mm to handle the amps in any temperature. I keep my power supply in a box under the mount with a tarp over it to protect from dew. Also in the box is the multi board that supplies laptop and converter. Prepare a $150 budget. Cheap stuff is not good for your mount, it doesn’t like unstable voltage. Better give it 14V, which caves in to 13 under load then 12V that caves to 9V under sudden load. Your mount will stop slewing immediately and beep until reset. Not cool during target acquisition. I was a bit shocked about when the guys at Bintel recommended me the converter but never had any issues, even when mixed up polarity once. Buy something big and heavy with a cooling fan and never replace it rather than going on budget with this. I tried batteries before and found them to be a waste of time. Even heavy duty UPS batteries. For the field I built a contraption consisting of a former 2.5sqare mm extension lead fitted with crocodile clamps to hook on the car battery and a 4x cigarette outlet. It runs the mount and dew heater plus the laptop via a dedicated 12V DC to 230V Ac converter. This works fine but the car needs to run the whole time. The internal governer will regulate the voltage. Petrol loss is negligible. Hope this gives you some ideas.
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