[JohnH]

A while ago I wrote about amazing service from Astronomic who replaced an Ha filter I had in no time flat depite the fact that it was not even new when I bought it.

Now I have to report the opposite - I bought a new Atik EFW with both the manual and USB contoller when it first came out. The manual controller was ok but the USB one was always unreliable often failing to intialise correctly and worse failing during an imaging session so much so I could not use it. It seemed to be the control cable connection that was flaky and to avoid repeated break/make of that connection each time I set up I bought another cable and left that plugged in permanently. That worked for a while but eventually I could only get good connection half the time and then not at all. I reverted to manual control but even that failed eventually with a bang and smoke from the control box.

Now all the time this was happening I was asking Atik to please supply the pin out for the contol cable so I could replace the dodgy connector - a 50c part. I have asked in the Yahoo support group and ATIK but the only response I ever got was send the whole thing back to Portugal.

Well, in the end I have had to do that and it has now been nearly 2 months - I have paid for the repair to the manual cotroller and for a replacement EFW control cable but have nothing yet - not even an indication that the itesm have been posted. I email ATIK (Rui) at least once a week - on average he has responded to about 1 in 4 of these emails.

I seriously counsel those considering Atik products for use in AU to consider the adequacy of their support service and product reliability before purchase.

I hope I am an isolated incident.