[gregbradley]

It really is a bit early days for me with this mount as even though I have had it for a while I have not used it that much so far.

It certainly holds a lot of promise with all its marketed features but how does it stack up in actual use?

The 3 way switch that allows easy balancing and a lock setting for travel sounds great. It is very convenient but PME can do this fairly easily by loosening the lock knobs. In practice though this 3 way switch has meant a more complex engineered system and it seems it is fussy and prone to needing delicate adjustment or the gears can slip or the motor stall. Software Bisque gives you a pdf document about how to adjust it (great just what you want to do on your brand new $11,000 mount - fix up someone elses error). But it lacks some vital data and could fail. So I wasn't very happy about that.

The mount comes with an impressive suite of software. However in practice I have found it is not so impressive. The Sky X is far less robust and reliable compared with the Sky 6. I have never had the Sky 6 time out, error out or stop for any reason but the Sky X will quite easily. At it needs is something like a power interruption to the mount, a hub issue with your camera through the hub or some such. Its done it to me quite a few times.


The supplied PEC software in the Sky X is advertised as taking the mount down to 1 arc sec or less.

I know several who have been unable to get it to work and I did exactly as per the instructions and the resulting curve was odd and it did not improve tracking one bit. In fact it appears to be bugged software on some setups as it will not load the resulting curve properly but again its early days and I need to try again.

It would be a nice touch if SB preloaded the PEC for you like AstroPhysics does with their mounts. It can be a complex action creating a PE curve. Not as easy as you would think.

T-point is a great piece of software. In the Sky X it promises to be improved. I have found the opposite. It is very very hard to setup to work and the manual appears to be lacking in detail to get it to work.
I spent many hours trying to get it to work and eventually got it to work sometimes and not others. I have a PME also and once I got t-point sorted on that setup it was very reliable even if it does not take the final computations as far as the Sky X version.

The mount apart from that is well thought out and appears to be well made. Customer support is poor though, if you post a problem you will more than likely be ignored and other users handle your question instead - often not really knowing but helpful nonetheless.

So its not all green on the PMX side of the hill!

I think once setup and sorted it will be a nice mount and initial images weren't too bad but if you are thinking of getting one keep in mind it is quite complex, expect problems, expect difficulty sorting the fussy (perhaps still some bugs) software and you may even be required to be a field mechanic.

I am experienced in handling my PME mount which has been a real pleasure and is a superb mount. PMX has promise but its not perfect and it sure isn't a PME.

Greg.