Mount stopped tracking, but slews on the buttons.

[Moonshed]

Last night it was tracking just fine, tonight it won’t track at all. It does slew perfectly okay using the hand controller.

Lately I have not been bothering with doing a two star alignment and using the GOTO, not necessary for finding Mars, so instead I run through the different modes until I get to the tracking rate and then select Sidereal, it works fine, used it lots of times when the target is obvious and I used it again last night.  So that’s what I did tonight, skipped the two star star alignment, started up the tracking and used the hand controller buttons to slew it over to Orion. I settled on Betelgeuse for finding the focus with the Bahtinov, that’s when I noticed it kept moving out of frame.

Can anyone suggest what could be wrong? The mount is the one in my signature. I will have a look at it again tomorrow in the daylight but couldn’t find any loose connections tonight. What a bummer! Beautiful clear night, could easily see M42 with the naked eye. Typical!

Any help greatly appreciated.

[jonathan]

I don't know the Bresser mounts but perhaps there's a method to reset it to defaults (check the manual or Bresser website support section).  In case you've done any configuration or setup in the handset then try to make a note of such settings first, go through every menu option and make notes of how everything is set.  In the manual there's probably a menu tree diagram so you can take a copy of it and tick off each item as you check it.

[Moonshed]

2 hours ago, jonathan said:

I don't know the Bresser mounts but perhaps there's a method to reset it to defaults (check the manual or Bresser website support section).  In case you've done any configuration or setup in the handset then try to make a note of such settings first, go through every menu option and make notes of how everything is set.  In the manual there's probably a menu tree diagram so you can take a copy of it and tick off each item as you check it.

Thank you for your advice. I have the manual and it does have a menu tree so I will carefully go through it. I think it possible that after working my way through the different settings in the menu to get to where I could switch on the tracking, it may be possible that because I left it there that while I was using the slew buttons I accidentally turned off tracking. I will have a run through and see what I can find.
Thanks again.

[Moonshed]

@jonathan   Glad to report that looking at the menu tree I noticed that under “Setup”, that I scrolled through to find the setting for switching tracking on, there is also another menu among the many titled “Target” that gives two options 1) Terrestrial 2) Astronomical. How obvious could it be? A quick trip to the “moonshed” and I switched on the hand controller and checked the settings, and guess what? Yep, while messing around slewing and one thing and another I had very cleverly managed to change the setting to Terrestrial, thereby switching the tracking off. A simple press of the button and it was fixed, now tracking nicely.

Thanks a lot for pointing me in the right direction!