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Evan,
The CG5 is a nice but quirky mount. Some of its oddities
1. Start-up requires location, time, AM/PM, timezone, date to complete set-up once you have powered on the mount. However the clock doesn't start running until you press enter for the date! So if you had entered everything but the date and weren't sure of the calander date and went inside to check, then came back out to enter the date, well then the time you entered would be a few minutes late by the time you press the final enter that starts the clock!
Solution - Be aware of this set time delay and allow say a minute ahead when seconds will be exactly 00 and only press the final date entry when your time is exactly 00 seconds!
2. Entering your lattitude / longitude with precise co-ordinates from say Google Earth - confuses the hell out of what time zone to select (for me Sydney is time zone 10). Yet when I choose custom site with precise lattitude and longitue down to the second of arc for both lattitude and longitude, and set time zone 10, then all my slews were 90 degrees out (like it thought the time was 4 hours earlier then it was) and (far worse) this pointing error had a very serious side effect; in abbout one out of every three gotos the motor housings would actually collide into each other!
Correction - select the nearest major city not custom site, or buy GPS, or use a custome site but much around with time zones (not advised!).
3. Sometimes on power on backlash is terrible. The scope really jumps with the lightest movement on the paddle, then when you release the key it jumps back the otherway.
Solution - either
at power on - do a slight movement with the paddle in all four directions one after the other, if its jumpy recycle the power. Only happens one time in 4 four me and this fixes it with at most 2-3 power cycles before I even enter the date or time.
or
If you are all set-up the go to utilities and change the backlash (even if its from the default 18 on all directions down to 0).
4. Power on doesn't say initialising, the hand controller screen is garbled.
Solution - power off for 10 seconds and re-power on, takes at most 2 goes for me.
5. Althought the mount knows your polar alignment pointing error from your say 3 star align, it only corrects for this on GoTo's - NOT TRACKING! So it will go to accurately, but not follow a star if your alignment is poor. Pressing Go To again with re-centre the star which will then drift off again. The mount only tracks using the RA motor with no correction for pointing errors!!!!!
Solution - accurately drift align!
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Other hints with this mount
Always align with RA up and Dec right to centre your guide stars to get best goto ability with the scope.
Check everything is level - including your bubble works with a spirit level.
Realise you lattitude declination reading can be between +/- 3 degrees off and correct for this. So lets say you set it for 45 lattitude then run a dowel rod though the polar scope cavity and measured its deflection to a straight, flat table and check is the angle 45 degrees with a 45 degree set square - mine was 2 degrees to low, so I corrected it, then popped out the plastic inclantation measure - corrected for the right position and then hot glued it back in to the correctly position =/- 0.5 degrees, and set it for the correct lattitude.
Best luck and lets swap experiences with this mount
Matt
Last edited by g__day; 25-08-2006 at 05:29 PM.
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