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Doh!!!!!
Got up early for a wander around the yard; a think about maybe going out fishing, and an early morning squint at the IIS forum.
Read some old drift align accuracy threads and then -DOH!!!!!
After all that kerfuffling around battling the wind last night; it struck me in one of those flashes of sanity I seem to be having with ever-decreasing frequency as senility creeps slowly nearer!!!
I hadn't checked/adjusted the tracking speed of the motor before all my frenekking around with RA drift!?!
Talk about a drongo - I'll blame Brian Reed (he's not here to defend himself - he did tell me that he doesn't get to go on forums much lately!)
The platform arrived a couple of weeks later than expected (not counting customs/freight shennanigans) because Brian couldn't do a tracking rate test 'cos of the weather over there - I reckon that with all my impatience over waiting for it to arrive, the bit about him setting the rate burnt itself into my feable brain to the point where I developed some sort of subconscious belief that this was an immutable element to the platform's character: sort of like the woodstain finish and stainless fixtures!
That's my story anyway, and I'm sticking to it!!!
I'm going back to bed now, I bet I'll lay awake thinking about setting the rate and re-calibrating: that and developing further the ideas that prevented much sleep after I first went to bed early this morning - ie, not fixing the locating/aligning rings I made to the ob deck floor; but rather going the whole hog and making a portable low-profile base for the EQ platform to sit on that has azimuth fine adjustment built into it (one circular piece with the EQ platform feet locating rings set in it, able to rotate upon another piece that has ground legs - with screw adjustment for discrete rotational movement of the "top" with regard to the ground leg section - as in the az adjustment of the HEQ5)
Cheers, Darryl.
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