The following is an evaluation of the polar alignment carried out by a friend of mine in December 2012. This was fowarded to Skywatcher through one of their dealers but as yet we have recieved no response from Skywatcher
" Last night I had a chance to test the Final release version of the HEQ5 firmware Ver3.32.
The new firmware is now designed to work with AZ and EQ mounts and will auto detect
what mount that it has been connected to, which I guess could be a good thing, maybe..
Here is my evaluation it might as well be a beta version, as once again the polar alignment
procedure dose not work. which is consistent with all previous version other then Ver 3.28b21
which was the first version to have it implemented, and works just great although not 100 percent
it is at least 90 percent accurate.
My alignment here is so close that I only needed to do the re-Polar Alignment procedure once
with minor adjustments, so I slewed the scope to Betelgeuse which at this stage was pretty high up
and not far from the Meridian then come back in an hour to check the drift and it hadn't even moved,
that is, no guiding.
So I'm sure there are lots of issues still with the firmware, although I didn't check the Sidereal rate problem,
at a guess I'm sure the issues with that hasn't been resolved."
Rob
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