Sweet! I got an LXD75 + N-6 for cheap...

[cathalferris]

Last night I purchased an LXD75 mount with attached 6" f5 newtonian, for significantly less than the going price, with less than about 10 hours of use. The battery box was knackered with a wire desoldered off the tab, but it appears that the bargain was a good one as the motors work, there isn't anything particularly wrong with the package, and it has a 2" focuser to boot.

As I'm currently off work recovering from a virus, I've been busy tinkering.. Today so far I've aligned the polarscope, re-meshed the worms on both axes and removed the tiny bit of shaft play that was present.

I have yet to complete the collimation of the scope as my tools are temporarily elsewhere at the moment. Once I've that done, I'll go through the axes alignment procedure, replace the batteries in the polarscope reticle illumination, and I'm good to go. I've to build up a lead from the original battery box to go from my 7ah power source to the scope.

The plan is to use this for webcam capture of e.g. Jupiter, using my copy of k3ccdtools. I may also use the mount for piggyback photography with a Canon Eos 550 that I can borrow. Also this will be used for general deep sky visual use.

It tracks so much smoother than the ETX70 that was my previous goto scope, and actually is so much quieter as well.

I'm looking forwards to getting a fair bit of visual use of this scope over the next few months, and I'm already saving towards an EdgeHD 9.25 ota to put on this.

Any thoughts or caveats from lxd75 owners past or present?

[CGolder]

I am a lxd75 owner, gave mine a nice tune up last weekend and its now running lovely.

I like the built in illuminated polar scope, mounts nice and solid.

are you running it in quiet mode? i dont consider this mount quiet in max speed slewing

Did u get it for a bargain price?

Colin

[tooth_dr]

Quiet mode? I loved my LXD75, and was sad to see it go. I was using one the other day and forgot how loud they are at max slew. How do you get it onto quiet mode?

Thanks

[CGolder]

Setup/Telescope/mount/Quiet mode/On>

from memory

[cathalferris]

Sometimes I'm using the quiet mode, it defaults to slew speed 8 (1.5 deg/sec) instead of slew speed 9 (4.5 deg/sec). Thankfully I don't think that it'll be much of an issue about the motor noise where I'll generally be using it.

I've spent part of today updating the handset with the latest 4.3eg firmware, and updated contents of the comet and asteroid tables.

I got it cheap as the guy selling it had broken the battery box, and it hadn't sold in a while, so the price was knocked down to less than a third of the price (less than €300) that his wife paid for it (~€700) as a present nearly two years ago. I brought along a 12v dc 1.25A wallwart and that powered it up fine, allowing movement in both axes. that showed that the motors were active and the autostar wasn't dead.

Collimating shows that the diagonal is not centered in the focuser and there isn't a facility to change that However, it'll still collimate fine otherwise. It shouldn't be a problem as I'll still get a full field illumination around the centre of the FOV.