Rossco72

I would say not ideal, remember the tracking gears are on and the servos remember where you are so that if you move by hand you can continue to track or use goto without another setup.

small adjustments are easy with the handset once you get into the habit of using it.

How about the manual movement of a goto compared with a one with no servo motors. Is there a clutch, so the OTA i free?

Manual movement is stiff but doable and once you get close you can use the handset buttons.....

Stuart I repost here.Can you tell me please what is the height of eyepiece when 14" telescope point at zenith? I can't find the answer anywhere.

It's about 1650mm give or take. I am just about 6 foot tall and it is at my eye level.

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No the 12" OTA can come off the base but the base is constructed from screws which aren't designed to be taken apart and built again.

The 14" and 16" bases are put together with bolts which are designed to be disassembled many times over as there is no other way to move the base from one place to another.

I use a 41mm panoptic and 26mm nagler and as you say a 3-6mm zoom. I purchased a magnetic weight which i attach to the OTA as needed to achieve balance for any particular EP or camera combination.

Cheers

The base design for the 14" and 16" is different from the 12" and smaller. The larger scopes have a collapsible box design because they are too large to fit through doors and in cars etc whereas the 12" and smaller are fixed.

As for the variance in quality, i don't know. Maybe I just have a poor one, maybe I just haven't been able to iron out the problems but I have 2 other skywatcher goto mounts and they pretty much work out of the box so I haven't experienced this level of poor performance by a skywatcher before.

Cheers

The moving around, although big and heavy, has been ok and expected. It's the poor GOTO and less than wonderfull tracking that's disappointed me.

The views through the OTA have been pretty great though.

Hi there,

I have the 350 flextube synscan. The views are amazing the scope is pretty nice except for the poor eyepieces supplied and terrible instructions.

However, it is VERY big, the base doesn't fit through most standard UK door frames without tilting on it's side and angling it around which is difficult because it is VERY heavy!! It does however split into 4 pieces if needed.

I have found the GOTO very poor and the tracking less than ideal (but obviously better than a manual dob!) From reviews I have seen this was much less of an issue on the 300 but I have never used one myself.

If you need to move it around a bit and are counting on the GOTO then i'd be more tempted by the 300, if you simply want the best light grasp and are prepared for the inconveniences then the 350 is the way to go.

After a fair bit of reading up today, i've got it working again.

I had to slightly expand the metal shield on the supplied cables as apparently the CGE uses these as a ground and it couldn't have been getting a good connection.

Rob,

I'd be interested if you know the cables u used as they obviously worked.

Cheers

Hi all,

Looking for some help, my CGE mount is playing up, I can't get it aligned as the Dec drive just keeps spinning round.

If I cancel and try to manually point at something, the RA drive works fine at whichever rate I select but the Dec just goes at the fastest rate (9) no matter what. Any attempt to goto results in the Dec just going round and round in circles!

any ideas?