Derbyshire Dave

Appreciate your comments, I've no experience of tri-piers, I've seen them though and realise that a lot of people use them..

Thanks Pete, appreciate your comments. It was a long and arduous fight over several months, comms would always work with APT and Sellarium, but intermittently with SGPro, so I'm ready for a change really. Plus you can't get an HEQ5 pro until at least December. Interesting to see all the commenst coming in, and then I can make a decision.

Interesting, FLO replied.. I do not normally recommend the EC versions. The encoder reduces the PE to virtually zero but does not model the mount and imaging train the way other encoder mounts such as the 10 Micron range do. Thus you still need to autoguide and the guiding approach needs to be quite different to that normally employed, and some customers struggle to adapt to that. The standard CEM40 has low and smooth PE that easily guides out and is more than good enough. I'd still be ineterested there are any other mounts I should be considering..

Been fighting communicatiions problems with my HEQ5 Pro, and finally today returned it for a refund. SO.... a new mount then... My main issue is that I have a very bad back, I could handle the HEQ5 Pro, no way that I could manage an EQ6, so moving away from Sky watcher, I have found the iOptron CEM-40, which weighs only 15.8 lbs with a payload of 40 ibs, which seems really good, and it looks like a much newer generation of gear than the Skywatcher products. Priced at £1779 with case and tripod. https://www.firstlightoptics.com/ioptron-mounts/ioptron-cem40-center-balanced-equatorial-goto-mount.html For another £1000 they have a version with RA encoders... https://www.firstlightoptics.com/ioptron-mounts/ioptron-cem40-ec-center-balanced-equatorial-goto-mount-with-ra-encoder.html They're saying that you can effectively turn off RA guiding, presumably PHD2 would still track declination drift. That's a big chunk of dosh extra, I have no experience of this, could you let me know thoughts on the mounts and RA encoding please. ALSO Are there any other mounts that I should maybe consider, which might be light enough for me to manage but still be sturdy and have a reasonable payload. Thanks guys..