[KG8]

Well tonight is the night, the seeing is good here in the inner-city and the moon is well phased and well placed for a little observation. But that is not what dragged me out into the back yard tonight. No Sir, tonight is the night when I put my theory about goto run-outs to the test. If you own an EQ6 you may or may not have noticed that after 3 or 4 hours the GOTOs go off and your eyepiece no longer centers back on target, even if you had entered that target in the PAE list. This has been a source of major frustration for me and I have gone to many lengths to find the cause. Last time out I noticed that the HC's internal voltage sensor was displaying the voltage at the mount as being 11.9V early in the night ( with a freshly topped off battery ) and 11.1V later on. Could this be right? The battery is fine, 12.3V at least, well within the 11~15V window the specs say the mount needs. It's the cold I thought, I heated the hand controller. No good! But what if... What if a volt is being consumed in the mount before it gets to the critical circuitry. Then the voltage will really be down around 11 at the mount and perhaps at the lower end of the range things get screwy?

Well tonight I have a 3.5A charger on the battery as I observe and the mount is saying 12.8V internally. Now we wait... and see... And if all goes well and we get no run-outs then it was voltage drop . All I need do then is put a DC-DC inverter between battery and EQ6 and bump the voltage up a volt or 2.

I shall return and report later then, but for now...
it's back to the moon.