Hi Brendon
I made a simple concrete pier shown here
http://fredsastro.googlepages.com/observatory that wasnt designed for a PME, but works fine with one. As here
http://fredsastro.googlepages.com/nebulae.
You dont really have to have "Plans" as such, just make sure you get the pier adaptor plate and set bolts into the pier to suit.
Its not hard to make either, sure you cant do it yourself ? ;-).
One thing you cant have with a PME though, esspecially with a PME, is a pier that moves at all, you need to fix that. Remove or make a hole in the slab and dig a hole, a big one for a pier base.
The reason I say that is, one of the joys of a PME, because of its pointing accuracy, is all the fancy tools that come with it to make it allways point exactly where it should, night after night. Just power up and go, no syncing, just take pics.
Tools include Tpoint, Tpoint mapper, Aquire star (for auto focusing using plate solving) polar aligning and other modeling tools.
To automap a full Tpoint map, and polar align to a few arcseconds is not a trivial excersize, and can take several hrs, not something you want to do on a weekly basis, and you would have to if the slab is moving at all, especially at 3m plus FLs.
You dont have to go this far off course, but thats the whole point of having a PME, and paying for it, so you can go the last mile and get it so smick it hurts ;-).
