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I took my shiny new Synscan Tour for an extended workout over the weekend. It was controlling a 10" Sywatcher dob.
I got the Tour because the scope came with a Syntrek controller which other than the possibility of nominal tracking does not seem to offer much advantage over push to.
Some of my comments are intended as customer feedback (improvement suggestions) in the hope that someone with contacts at Skywatcher reads this and passes it on as they don't seem to welcome direct customer feedback.
Overall quite pleased but with a few frustrations.
- Much easier to use than flicking around the menus on a convetional Synscan.
- Display was easy to use and most menu's made sense.
- Seemed to keep track of where it was pretty well when the scope was manually pushed to an object.
- On a number of occasions after completing a 3 star align the telescope started driving off on it's own and would not respond to further input. Power everything down and start again was the only fix I found. I'd had similar last Tuesday night as well.
- It has a nice Precise Goto feature that nominally goes to a bright nearby star first when slewing to a faint object in a part of the sky not close to a known alignment point. You center that star then it moves to the nominated target. The facility can be turned off.
; It does not seem to consider that solar system objects may be brighter than nearby objects. Silly when looking for Saturn, absurd when using a solar filter and slewing to the Sun in daytime.
; No capability to add the final target as an aligned point if adjustements are required when you get to it, that would seem like a simple extra.
; Similar to the previous point it would be nice to be able to tell it to realign a point if tracking errors occur and do something similar to PAE adjustment based on the difference.
- I dropped the little stylus once (thankfully found it when I worked out it was missing). Should be supplied with a pack of spares.
- If you dim the display down for night time usage you need a really dark spot to get to the menu to set it up for daytime usage (under a picnic blanket in the car).
- Tracking was no where near good enough for any deep sky astro work even with short exposure times but that was probably the dob mount rather than the controller. I still need to play with backlash settings etc.
- Also had some off behaviours where I'd drive the mount slightly one way and the motors drove it back afterwards which was frustrating when I was trying to center an object.
- It would be nice if the controller kept track of what type of mount it was last connected to and defaulted to that rather than selecting from the same list.
- Also be nice if after connection there was the ability to nominate an object that you were pointed at as an alternative to entering angles. If I'm centered on Venus it should be a more precise indication of where the scope is pointed than a nominal compas bearing.
- It would be nice to be able to record an observing log (targets slewed to or click on an target in the display and have it added to a log)
- The included dictionary seems to be poor quality with errors, probably better not to have it than have it as a poor quality after thought.
- It would also be nice to use the controller as a pass through for remote control from a PC (and on the pretty please list camera control via one of the USB ports).
The controller seems to run a piece of software called iSky on WindowsCE using an Arm S3C2440 Processor (Samsung I think).
The controller is great but has the potential to be a lot better with some extra software development.
Bob
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