Chiz

Hello,

About 18 months ago I bought my first scope - a Skywatcher 150PL on EQ3-2. At the same time I bought a dual axis motor which has worked just fine - until now.

On Friday night I was having fun trying to image Saturn and all was well. The I noticed it had stopped tracking and the red light was permanently on (it is normally green when no buttons are pressed and the RA is tracking). I tried all four buttons - they all clicked as normal and none of them seemed to be stuck.

The one page set of instructions says that the LED should flash if it thinks the batteries are on the way out. I checked them with a digital voltmeter and that said they were putting out around 5.9V.

Last night I tried again with 4 new batteries (voltmeter said they were just over 6V) and the problem still persists. I tried it without the scope & counterweights to see if that made any difference, unplugging the connectors to the motors etc., but nothing has helped.

If I press any of the buttons then these have no effect - all I have is the solid red light and no tracking

As I said, I've had the scope & motors since around Nov 2009, but due to a number of reasons I have not used it anywhere near as much as I would have liked. Each time I have used it things have worked fine. In total it has probably had less than 24 hours usage. It is all stored indoors in a dry environment (not in a cold damp shed) and everything looks as good as it did when it was new.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have encountered this problem and I hope someone out there knows what is wrong, and more importantly, how to fix it.

Help, suggestions etc. welcomed

Thanks in advance,

[]kywatcher - Dual-Axis D.C. Motor Drive for EQ3-2

A really useful, helpful and friendly forum - one of those that makes the Internet a good place to be. I have found most of the answers I was looking for simply by searching the threads and hence not posted many questions myself. One of the great things is that posters are very clear about whether they are stating fact or expressing a personal opinion - very useful for us newcomers about to leap into the unknown.

I agree with AlexF that a glossary full of terms, abbreviations and TLAs would be very useful to us newcomers who don't know about DSOs, OTAs and POWs (or should that be PsOW?) without having to go off to Google or Wikipedia to find out. I have used a couple of technical forums (e.g ControlBooth) where the system automatically creates hyperlinks when a post contains any keyword in the glossary (on phpBB using a plug-in). If vBulletin has a similar feature or plugin available then I think this would be a very useful addition for beginners.