stephen_usher

This may indeed be the case, however when one distributes a product, it is an inferred confidence in the quality of said product, because the distributors name and goodwill is attached

No?

Ray

Well, given that you hardly ever get to know the name of the distributor, there's less pressure. The UK one is anonymous.

In Australia and New Zealand the distributor's trading name is Tasco, which is a name known in Britain as a perveyor of cheap (and not very good) telescopes via mail order catalogues in the 1970s.

Olly, from what I understand, Sky-Watcher is a brand name of Synta, which is a Chinese company. The agents in the separate countries are merely importers and distributors, nothing more.

That should have said "decernable" and not "decker able". Autocorrupt strikes again!

The level of Dec backlash on mine is small enough that on tracking rate 2 and pressing the button on the hand control it takes a couple of seconds to start moving the scope. So, in the scheme of things not huge. Actually no worse than my old CGEM mount.

Having said that, when I first set it up, before moving onto the correct pier adapter, I could see no decker able backlash.

I can't test mine at the moment as I'm about 300 miles away from the mount. I'll have to wait until the new year when I get back home.

Hi

Yes it does have the red dot but to be honest I've haven't attached it. I've just using the standard finder

Would this be an issue ?

It does have the calibrate censors and I've done that

Out of interest. When I observe from local farmland it's harder to get aligned correctly and the signals on my phone are very poor. Would this mean that the gps signal is hard to get from here and is therefore not getting a good alignment?

The red dot finder is not only a finder but also an electronic level and compass. If connected then the alignment process will do extra operations as it will try to determine how level the base is.

Seeing as GPS uses satellites and not the phone system, your mobile signal has no bearing  on the issue. It could be that in the farmland the ground is less firm and the tripod legs could slowly sink into the ground, throwing your alignment out.

Does your scope have the red-dot finder/levellr/compass  module? If this is out of alignment when you set up your 'scope then the system will not be able to work out how level the base is.

My Dad hs one of these on his 'scope and it causes more problems than it solves. It's better to use a spirit level to level the base and then the optical tube and a compass to point the tube nrth before powering up and aligning.

By far the most important thing to do when setting up to stop drift is to make sure that the tripod and base of the telescope are as horizontal as possible. I usually set the whole thing up and put a spirit level on the top of the base unit with the clutch undone so that I can rotate it freely and see that I have everything level in all orientations, adjusting the tripod legs as necessary.