Quote:
Originally Posted by jase
When you start to pay big money for a mount, your judgement should extend beyond its tracking performance and carrying capacity. You should also be weighing up an additional couple of items;
- Software - In today's realm of high end mounts, most imagers are results focused. No point having a sophisticated mount sitting idle not producing the goods. As such a mount should easily integrate with a variety of software to streamline the data acquisition process with minimal effort. The money we're talking you should expect it to work out of the box or near to.
- Technical Support - Ideally support should be local or close to your time zone. Dealing with the US isn't too bad, but Europe painful. Make sure you don't come across language barriers when you need to pick up the phone. Bouncing emails back and forth can be unproductive at times. If the mount has a large install base, you'll probably find other users who'll resolve your issue quickly as the first point of call.
- Ease of use - Its the mount's servo controller system (its brains) that make the decisions. If this is software assisted with a common product, it will make it easier for the operator to quickly configure and operate. Most if not all will integrate with ASCOM allowing you to make use of ASCOM client of choice. You will still need core software to be the ASCOM hub.
I'm sure there are a few other items which I've missed. Point being however that the mount itself, while a very important one should also be considered with the above items. |
Ya mate this is why I brought the ASA!
Tons of software for it just about all the currently stuff works well with the DDM.
ASA are good as gold to deal with once you have got your head round the accents --- but then I was in NZ for a year or more so I know all about hard to understand accents!!
Tons of the DDM mounts around in Europe and the Asa Yahoo forum is active and they are helpful to.
Dunno about ease of use yet coz I havent even looked at my new DDm but it seems like the new and differentness of these direct drive mount with the high precision encoders is wearing off and every one is getting the hang of them. Itsall ASCom like most other mounts so no worries there!
When I did my homework I found that the mount I thought I would buy had just as many probs as any of the others so I reckoned that going up a notch and spending a few bucks more on the newert tech instead was a no brainer.
The direct drives will replace every thing else pretty soon I reckon specially at the top end any how.
So what did I get? The latest and the greatest with big load high precision no period error and that is starting to take over europe astro scenes and is supported by latest software apps and Ascom and has good support from the makers and users and for not much more than the next best thing which does have PE.
