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Hi Floyd,
That thread was by me. I did have some teething troubles with my PMX. But I must say Bisque got on it and handled it for me.
In my case the PE originally was fine. But because they have this 3 way switch system to be able to unlock and lock the axes it requires a complex pin and cam system that appears to be quite sensitive to adjustment to perform properly.
So what can happen is this pin/cam unit was not adjusted properly and it causes the RA axis to slip and grind on the gears (ouch- it makes a horrible sound like your gears just gotten written off!). This happened on my mount several times.
They have a pdf document about how to adjust this pin/cam. The document is well written but unfortunately it is not complete and is missing a few vital steps. So following that document you may or may not achieve success.
In my case it seems the worm did in fact get slightly damaged by this and I started getting a bad bump in my PE causing stars to look like double stars in my images.
To their credit SB sent me a brand new worm to replace the old. I did this and it all worked well except I still had a slight slippage problem (only happened once) and some backlash in the guiding I did not have before. A quick post got the solution which I implemented and it appears to be perfect now.
I see they dropped the price to $7995. That is very competitive.
Would I get one again? Well I love my PME mount, it really is a gem.
PMX so far is not in the same league in that I would regard it as a lovely mount but it may require/may not require some fiddling to make it smooth. I suspect this is all behind SB now as I got one of the first out. Not a good purchasing plan to be the first as the bugs aren't yet full sorted.
The last time I used the Sky X as far as I could tell everything now works and all the bugs that I was encountering (PEC not working and perhaps T-point modelling too hard to get going) are now sorted. Part was an update and part was studying the software more and making sure I was using it correctly. I use CCDsoft and it integrates very well.
You can get a driver for the Lodestar that works with CCDsoft (I used to use Lodestar with CCDSoft and PME) but it does not allow you to use autodarks in autoguiding which you should do with Lodestar.
I think a mature system like AP900 would be tempting next time around but now its working I quite like the PMX. Its very sophisticated and part machine, part software. I think I would especially at $7995. AP900 is more than that isn't it? If it were $9,000 I would lean to pay a tad more and get an AP1200 or whatever their larger unit is now. It would be a bit more but you would be guaranteed 2nd to none performance. AP really is the standard in this hobby. Nobody does it better.
But AP preload PEC into their mounts. That saves some time. PMX has a higher weight capacity than AP900. AP1200 is more the competitor to PMX and it is more expensive. But I have never heard of a complaint about an AP1200 ever. I think you can also buy an upgraded encoder for it to make it sub 1 arc second accurate (unless that's only the AP1600).
I think you are safe getting a PMX now. There are quite a few using them on this site and the images I see using them have beautiful round stars which I associate with SB mounts.
Greg.
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