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Guide scopes are a little old fashioned. I try to eliminate them from my system as they usually give substandard results. I would be surprised if a 50mm scope had trouble finding a guide star though. Perhaps its out of focus? A 50mm scope would be quite wide field. I don't know where you image though so if you are in badly light polluted areas that could make sense.
These days an off axis guider is a lot cheaper than they used to be and they work extremely well and reliably.
Teleskop services have a few, Starlight Express sell a few. It depends what camera you are using. DSLR?
Atik, Lacerta, Starlight Express, Teleskop Services from my research all seem to make a good off axis guider at low prices and quite thin so they don't take up a lot of room.
I would go that route.
Guide cameras are more expensive. The latest Lodestar X2 from Starlight Express sounds extremely sensitive. I like my SBIG STi guide camera which works well with CCDsoft and takes autodarks and so gets rid of hot pixels (its clean anyway). Lodestar works with PHD and Maxim not so much CCDSoft.
You should consider the guiding part of your system as vital rather than is it really regarded as without a good guiding system you can't get the longer exposures with sharpness you want no matter how good your mount is.
Greg.
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