Hi everyone,
I just took delivery of my WD17 and I am quite thrilled with this little mount so far. It was a bit smaller than I expected, and it looks very well built. I used a sturdy photo tripod with a bowl and a fairly wide base and it fit the mount almost perfectly. So far I don’t see any reason to get the ZWO one. I also got the little extension pier so it sits a little safer on top of the tripod.
I first played with it in the house to see what it would do, without a telescope on top. I connected it to ascom, asiair, phd, skysafari on my IPad, all without a single problem. The little handcontroller is pretty handy too. I got mine wired because of shipping restrictions and I am going to keep it that way. I don’t think I’ll be using it much, but it may be handy at some times. I also connected my phone wirelessly to to mount and that worked as well. It is an android phone with an Onstep app on it. I already know Onstep as I use it on my large mount as well, so that made things a bit easier. I used Asiair to sync settings to the mount which works fine for coordinates but I was not sure it also updated the time as Asiair does not say that it does, just coordinates. However once you put the mount outside the GPS will do it for you and it worked perfectly. Slewing the mount is extremely quiet, you can hardly hear it move, seems very smooth. I only had about an our of starry sky, so I decided to put it out and it was setup in no time at all, no balancing or anything just put on your telescope and go. I used a small refractor and guider on top of that. The mount ofcourse could easily handle it without a glitch. I did polar align it with the asiair and that was very easy as well, the controls on the base are quite smooth and easy to adjust especially altitude.When I got it under 10” I decided to do some goto’s , that also worked very well, no problems at all and only small corrections after the plate solve, put everything smack in the middle of the fov.
But I am sure, like everyone reading this, I was really interested in guide performance. So I put it on a star close to my meridian to calibrate with the asiair. It was done in a few minutes and I left it guiding for a few minutes at default. It resulted in a pretty smooth run, with combined rms of about 0.4 with deviation both up and down around that. That was without any tweaking of the mount. The one thing I could not find out was the mount’s guide speed, you cannot set it in the handcontroller, nor in the ascom driver, nor in the Onstep Web interface as it is not working for this mount. But guiding was really pretty good out of the box and with some tuning you might get better numbers. I will be trying that soon.
After the session I let ASIair send the mount home and that did not work well. The mount slewed to some random position and said that it was at home, which it wasn’t. Then if you start it up again, it thinks it is at home so your goto’s will not work. Easiest thing to do then is slew to a position where stars are visible and platesolve, that way you recover its position and you can go from there. I had to get used to the fact that I could not manually move the mount. It is quite stiff and I suspect the a small scope will stay where it is if the power to the mount fails, it has got braking on both axis. A bigger scope may be an issue, but I don’t think so, but haven’t tried it either.
So far I am very happy with this little mount. I am expecting it to do real well. I will report here when I have some more information. I will also take some images and post them here for those interested.
By the way I ordered from Robert here on the forum, and it all went very smoothly although shipping was a bit of an issue, but that was a customs thing in Europe and in no way the sellers fault.
Cheers,
Peter
