Telescope Reviews: My 12" has arrived, what to check for...

Having just gone through this a week ago, I have some experience in the area.

Contrary to the feeling of dread I got from reading reports of bad out-of-box quality, mine was perfect - hope yours is too. Please post to let people know your experience so we get current data points.

My initial checkout was done indoors, so I did not wait for the GPS fix. You may wish to go outdoors but make sure to keep both the scope and finder covered if its during daylight.

What I did was to set up the tripod and place the scope on it - not too difficult for one person in reasonable condition. The base centers well when you raise the bolt into the conical depression in the base. I find you really have to crank the tripod bolt or its too easy to actually spin the base on the tripod - those surfaces seem to be very slippery.

Unlock the axes (be careful in the altitude axis - its nose-heavy even with the finder, focuser, diagonal and 26mm EP, so support the tube) and check the free movement. You will have almost two full rotations in azimuth. The movement on mine was super-smooth. Lock the axes again - not too tight. I recommend you install a tube balance kit ASAP - I put on rails from Scopestuff right away and I have 2 lbs of weight at the mirror end of the bottom rail.

Home position (the way you orient it before applying power) is tube level and base panel on south side. Make sure the azimuth is right in the middle of its range - this is critical. You should get almost a full rotation back around to north in azimuth in both directions. If not, the GOTO slews will run into the hard stops and make horrible noises causing heart failure. If that happens, unlock the azimuth immediately and start over. This has happened to me once - and once is quite enough to hear that noise!

Make sure you're not too near a large lump of metal like the truck you came to pick it up in. The iron mass may prevent the north sensor from finding magnetic north and again it might spin into an azimuth hard stop looking for north. This has also happened to me once, and I already knew I didn't like that noise!

Check mirror travel. Unlock by turning the lock knob to unlock (takes several turns to reach the end of the travel). Turn the focus knob. I have exactly 30 turns of adjustment (although its hard to count without a marking on the knob).

Turn it on (you did hook up power, right?). Note: forget about C cells - you'll go broke because it will get nowhere near 20 hours out of a set.

The Autostar will go through its initialization and show its firmware version - mine came with 1.6b from the factory, which is still the latest. You have to acknowledge the silly Sun warning every time. Fortunately, the key (in my case '5') it wants you to press is not random (at least not in my experience) so you can short-circuit that process by just stabbing at that key when the nearly unreadable message starts to scroll.

It will then start searching, first for north (this is where it could try to slew more than a full turn if the sensor couldn't find north near the home position) then for level (it will tip the tube up and down several times near level - you will hear a small click from the side of the fork with the GPS housing on it as the mechanical sensor passes through level), then for mount tilt and tip (similar to finding tube level, but at two locations separated by 90 degress of azimuth).

Then it will try to get the GPS fix. For me, this took several minutes but I'm a lot farther from California than you are (the place it last saw the satellites) - subsequent fixes from the same or similar locations are very fast. If you are not outdoors where you can get a GPS fix, you can abort this by pressing Enter and entering the approximate information manually.

You can try an alignment, but without stars it may be tough unless you just tell it you found the allignment star when it asks. Play with the slew on both axes and at all speeds (press 'speed' and one of the numbers to set the speed). Check the focuser by pressing 'focus' to enter focuser control mode (you did attach it and plug it in?) and use the same slew keys to run it in and out. It only has one inch of travel. To adjust the focuser speed, press 'focus' (if not already in that mode) and use the up/down arrow keys at the bottom to select one of the 4 speeds. Note, you need to press 'focus' (or maybe 'speed') again to leave focuser control mode and return to slewing mode.

That should be it. Have fun - I am!

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LX200GPS12/SK80ED/ETX90AT LPI/DSI/SolarMax60
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