Telescope Reviews: 10Micron

Hello,

my name is Rolf Geissinger and I am a member of the 10micron beta tester team. Baader-Planetarium authorized me to give a statement in their name until their CN account is verified in order to get the users informed on time.

Unfortunately Mr. Gerber left the project of
betatesting and gave the mount back before we could finalize the work in finding his problem.
Mr. Gerber worked with firmware version around 1.7.2 - meanwhile there have been different new
releases. 2.7.9 is the actual firmware version which certainly is much advanced - but this was not
the source of Mr.Gerber´s problem.

Mr. Gerber´s mount was shipped back to the factory 10 Micron where it got a very thorough examination.
The mount was performing very well when tested at the manufacturer, not any "jumps" during guiding/tracking
were detectable. To solve the mystery, the software engineer examined the tracking logs again that Mr. Gerber
had e-mailed while he was a member of the Betatester team. It was found that the biggest jumps were due
to some strange interrupts in the signal from the guider that "freezed" the guiding commands.

The reason for this behaviour was caused by an outside phenomenon, probably induced from somewhere else
into the electronics. Most likely due to the camera or PC, guiding head, power source, switches, cables - we
cannot say where exactly but definitely not in the mount.It was a unique problem in the equipment/configuration.

Mr. Gerber was not aware of this at this time and we have not been aware at this time too because we could not
directly test it as the mount was remotely used somewhere in France. This is also a logical explanation for the
fact that there are not any other customer reporting about such extreme behaviour of their mounts.

Mr. Gerber is right, some of the betatester team experienced jumps too a year ago, but nowhere that big and
certainly not that much.

The reason for those small jumps was analyzed to be a universal problem of any worm wheel drive - namely
"static friction" (stiction) - happening in the very moment when the DEC motor starts to make a guiding correction.
Every mount with worm-gear drive is affected by stiction. The new firmware 2.7.9 has the function of
"stiction compensation" which allows to finetune the drive in a way that when the motor starts it overcomes this
"stiction" almost completely.

Furthermore the newest firmware version enables "dual axis guiding", meaning that the declination axis is
contiunuously working in ever so miniscule increments so that no static friction jumps can occur. With these
new tools and the newly developed "Advanced PEC" (A-PEC), the drive is working very smoothly, that explains
that users report guiding accuracies around 1"-2" - without any jumps.

The new firmware also enables the GM mounts to run much higher slewing speeds so that they are now able to
track satellites ( without any PC or Laptop attached ) - for example please check Mr. Duins photo of an Ariane
rocket stage:

http://www.10micron.de/kundenzitate_htm/duin_erfahrungsbericht.htm

If 10micron mounts would generally create "jumps" of eight seconds while tracking - or cause similar problems -
they would have a hard time to sell the mounts and fight against all the complains of the customers.

This is not the case.

The HPS mounts with high accuracy encoders will be available as a second, higher priced product
line from May/June this year on. They are very interesting for those customers which don´t have an observatory
and are using mobile equipment. The HPS mount line is not a replacement, it is a new product category
that fills a gap on the marked.

Best Regards
Rolf Geissinger