Meade lxd55 mount

[triton1]

So my brother bought this mount and 8 inch sct a year and a half ago from tele house secondhand and he,s never used it.He decided to bring it up to me as he said it's very complex to use and could I have a go.I want to go down the goto route eventually so I thought why not.

My first impressions of the mount is its another eq5/cg5 clone but better fefined and finished,there are subtle differences around where the latitude bolts are and all the cabling is neat,the power connector is firmly in place on a nice interface and the polar scope has been heated and oil dipped to give it a nice bronze finish.I was surprised it came with an ally tripod though..

My first job then was to download a manual and print one out all 60 pages of it what!.I ran out of ink so had to read it off the tablet what a nightmare.Now I don,t class myself as totally stupid but reading this started to make my brain hurt so I went down the route of playing with the handset and understanding the menus modes and directories and routines.After half an hour cracked it I was doing 2 star alignments in the house so not accurate.I slewed to m31 and using stellarium it pointed in the right direction.

Now come the questions when using the manual it asks what country then nearest city so in my case it's uk then London wow that,s accurate so back into handset and using "custom" you can put in your coordinates for different locations so my longitude is -000* 42' 15'' but the handset will not accept a minus so is it a case of subtracting that from 360 and entering 359* 17' 45'' instead?

The other thing is I,ve left time zone as 000 and daylight saving off.I ask this because every time you use the mount you have to put the date and time into the mount so why would it need this info.If you where in the States you would be 5hours behind so you would enter your time accordingly or am

I missing something?

I,ve babbled on enough so if anyone can help me out it will be much appreciated I don,t want to let Bruv down

Regards Jonn

[triton1]

Oh I forgot to ad it's the Autostar

[michael8554]

If you move the cursor to the left of the first Longitude figure there you should be able to change the + to - with the Scroll keys, then enter 000 42 15

Don't forget to enter your Latitude too, that's the next menu item 

Would be good if they kept time but they don't, it needs the date and time to know where everything is at that moment.

You enter date and time as accurately as you can - set up to the next minute and press ENTER when your clock hits the minute.

If you have time zone is zero and DST off you can enter local time which is GMT now, but remember to keep entering GMT when the clocks change.

Michael

[Dave In Vermont]

It's a pretty straight-foreward Autostar setup. Which means it's a Meade PITA (pain-in-the-<koff>). You'll get used to it. The LXD55 was replaced by the LXD75, which most prefer. I have 2 of these, and think they're pretty good - once you get used to them. Mine are both awaiting an overhaul to keep me amused.

As an historical footnote: Mine were made in 2003. Bought one with the AR5 F/9.3 refractor - a very good achromat. But I put the mount on a custom wooden-tripod. Much better! The other sits under my 200mm F/4 Rich-Field Newt. Bought it for a song from Meade around 2005 when Meade was trying to get rid of their stock.

You'll figure it out,

Dave

[triton1]

Big thanks to Dave and Michael this site is a wealth of information what would I do without you

Regards Jonn