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THE CONCLUSION:
OK, after so much grey sky, and general lethargy on my part, I can finally put this to bed with a happy ending.
Sky Safari for Android works really well, with only the occasional hiccup, which I will try to explain shortly.
The Tablet mount for tripod was an easier fix than I thought. A small piece of MDF, glued in at a strategic point, solved the whole flexure problem. Photos to follow.
The WIFI unit (Nexus-S), from Astro Devices (thanks Serge!), worked first time out, after pulling down the refresh rate in Sky Safari to 4, from 10. $152.50 delivered, in December. I will point out that I needed the Meade serial cable (which I already had). Everything else was included. Serge had not had the chance to fabricate one at the time, but this may or may not have changed since then.
I have only had the single opportunity to field test this under dark-sky conditions. But for the 4 or so hours that it was running, I only had 2 instances of the same weird thing happen ..
SS would be happily directing the scope to whiz back and forth across the sky, hitting things right in the middle of the eyepiece, or very close to it. For my scope, a good result!
Then, seemingly randomly, I would go from say, Sirius to Rigel, and the scope would slew to somewhere in the vicinity of Achernar! So I would manually slew back to Sirius (easy target), and tell SS to align on it. After that, it would hit targets again as if nothing was wrong.
This happened twice as I say, in about 4 hours of use, so I'm definitely not complaining about it.
FWIW, I am running SS v1.8.5 on a Galaxy Note 10.1 (N8010), running Android 4.1.2 (stock, but rooted).
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