As my 13 yr old daughter would say "RAGE!!"

[IvanT]

Things were going oh so well, well, apart from the recent UK torrential rain and usual cloudy skies that is

During the recent bad weather I contented myself with a few little mods to my new SWE 200P.

1) Hartzman mask - courtesy of Andy's Shot Glass. Was simple to make, just drilled out the sealed hole in the scope supplied cover, the other already had a removable cap. Clear skies tonight, got out side, homed in on Vega, de-focused, nice split star and the mask allowed me to get perfect prime focus. Task 1 - Check.

2) During the week I made two Wilcox Rotating Rings - again, courtesy of Andy's shot glass. Worked a treat, no more contortionist moves to get to the EP. Task 2 - Check.

3) My Skywatcher Laser Collimator arrived during the week, as I suspected, the collimation was way off (in no small part to my fiddling with it), was able to get it sorted with help from Astro_Baby (cheers Mel). Best views I've had to date of Jupiter. Task 3 - Check.

4) Looking good for tonight I thought to myself, and sure enough, no clouds and apart from an extremely bright moon, the skies were at long last viewable, even Capella had lost most of her shimmer. Performed a star test of the collimation, as close to perfect as I think I'll get. Task 4 - Check.

This is all going too well I thought to myself and it was at that point that I was proved right.

The handset on my HEQ5 SyncScan upgrade (one month old today) gave up the ghost. A couple of weeks ago when I

was using it, I noticed that the display started showing garbled characters. Switching it off and on resolved the problem, I'm an IT consultant, off and on always works

It's since then happened a few times so I upgraded the firmware. The upgrade worked without any problems and the handset display problems seemed to be fixed. Tonight, the same problem happened again only this time the handset would not reset (so much for my off and on theory). The direction keys still function and I can press the Rate key and change the slew rate but the display remains blank. The screen back-light is working just no text. I performed the firmware upgrade again hoping that would sort it, the upgrade worked again but the handset remains all but useless. I've also noted that one of the motors is making a grinding noise, it's was doing this even before it was installed in the mount I just assumed it was just something I'd have to live with. The other gear runs almost silently so I'm thinking that maybe the upgrade also contained a faulty motor, I think it's the dec motor, tracking is spot on so both motors are working ok I'm just concerned that I've received a faulty upgrade kit and that the dec motor will "grind" to a halt sometime soon. As I said, I tested the motors before installing in the mount and the noise was there from the get go.

Feeling more than a little annoyed (was really looking forward to getting my teeth into some DSOs) I swung round to the torch in the sky, the collimation really has made a huge difference

My 1st decent shot of the moon, I think it's decent but am willing to hear critisims

I've mailed the guys at FLO and I'm sure they'll sort it out for me, was just wondering if anyone else had similar problems with this handset?