OK, so the guiding saga goes on. I won't let it sit till I have a solid understanding of what the limits are. I've gone back to the EdgeHD8, and have been able to take long, 5 to 10 min exposures which is great, but I see lots of erratic behavior in the guide graph. Here's what I've done so far:
To expand on the tripod base, I'd like to have a couple, maybe 3 locations in the yard. If at all possible I'd like them to all have the exact same polar alignment. So to start, I'm trying to find a way to make the tripod perfectly level at each location. For that I'm trying to use a laser level. I adjust the leg height so that the top of the leg ends are each at exactly the same height.
Note, from here on, I'm using the new camera setup. ZWO ASI1600MM / ZWO ASI178MC starting with guiding using the 1600, then moving on to using the 178 with the OAG.
OK, I got a few clear nights to try things out. Bad things come in threes. So first night the computer "Astro" suffered a flash failure. Terrible, one day to recover an older backup, now at least the backup is newer. Next two nights, I tried to do a drift align. Things didn't work out so well. Azimuth was oscillating wildly, and I couldn't get it to calm down. Next night I try and be more through with the initial alignment, but it's still oscillating wildly. I also tried to do both Azimuth and Altitude over several iterations, but it just kept on acting wild. I tried to balance east, but it didn't help. I'm thinking that the issue is the cabling was snagging a bit. I've tweaked the cables, and I'll try and balance perfectly again and I'll try again tonight...
Plan for tonight:
It worked! It was binning! Once I set the binning to x4 it started behaving normally!!!!
OK, and the next night I tried, the alignment was around 2.3 which is great. I didn't have to do a polar alignment. It was cloudy though, and I was tired, so I packed it up shortly after confirming the polar alignment. Some things to note though:
Next night. So I got past the 178 image problem. I was careful not to do anything with the 178 while using kstars/ekos. Nice stars. Now calibrating is the problem:) RA was drifting terribly. I reset the tripod level, as it seemed to be sitting funny in the flanges in the ground. I think that resetting the level may have banged up the polar alignment enough that the drift was so bad that it could not calibrate. Next clear night, should be Sunday, I'll make sure to do an all-star align first, so it's close, then do the phd drift align. I think that I was a bit rushed balancing this night as well, so that may have had some impact. I've spent some time balancing it since, so it seems really well balanced right now..
-- OH, and since I've had to setup new configurations again, I think that I forgot to set DEC to resist-switch... I should attach known good configs to this blog, so I don't loose them.
Feb 18th: Successful Polar align.
Spent a bunch of time balancing, and making sure the wires are not interfering. The mount was also nicely leveled from previous attempts. I also redid the OAG setup so that it will work with both the EdgeHD 8 / .7 reducer, and the William Optics GT81/.8 reducer. The end result was the OAG and main cameras were not both focused. Because of this I decided to do a polar alignment with the main camera, it worked out really well. I first spent quite a bit of time doing a 2 star + 4 calib star alignment, and an all-star polar alignment. That brought me under 5 for the polar alignment. Next I did a drift alignment with PHD. Went very well. Finally I tried to do the whole thing over again with the OAG, but I couldn't get it to focus. I think that it was all fogged up, and I was really tired at this point, so I just called it a night. At least it's nicely polar aligned now. Next night I'll try the whole thing again with the OAG!
Feb 22 2019
Was able to get past the orthagnol error by increasing the pulse time. Then past the"Dec not moving enough" by increasing the side reel rate on both the mount and PhD. I tweaked the gain in the 178 and the stars came through great. Calibration was great but guiding not so good. The polar alignment from last night was still great. I did a one star, not even perfectly centered, then platesolved! In the end I tried to take a photo and the 1600 was solid white in kstars, but not in PhD????
Mar 12 2019
It's been a while. It was a somewhat mistake laden night, but there were some successes. Guiding was pretty much the same. I was using .75 sidereal and 2x binning (maybe -- see mistake laden TM). I did manage to get a photo of a galaxy in Leo using the awful guiding...
Much better guiding results tonight, but still bad. Total RMS = 2.55 (1.78"). This night I was using 0.75 sidereal and 2x Bin. It started out worse, and so I decided to redo the drift alignment even though it was not terrible. I ended up adjusting it quite a bit, and got it down below 5 which was great. I also found that the best way to align the mount is to just do a "quick align" with the scope in the home position, then plate solve. Another thing I found was that I could successfully balance East by adjusting the weight and get feedback from the PHD graph to stop adjusting as soon as the guiding is all in one direction.
OK, so I'm adjusting things, and I notice something strange. RA rates seem to differ between directions. Right on the handset takes 1:00 min for one full rotation, and 3 min 20 sec in the left direction.
Mar 16th 2019
Tragedy strikes! I take apart the mount and adjust the gears. Seems to help, but the RA speed in different directions is really bad. I try resetting the connection and it seems to work. Next I adjust the worm gear, as I can't to much with the other RA gear. I do this, and later that night the mount is behaving terribly. It lurches and jumps. I give up for the night. Next night I go in and very carefully re-adjust the worm. It turns much more freely, and when I test slewing, it seems to be acting great, so I'm now waiting for another clear night to try it again...
Mar 20th 2019
Not much different. So I get everything back together and I'm up and running. Everything seems to be working normal now. No improvement really. Guiding is around 2.00 RMS. PHD2 is complaining about dec backlash. Funny thing is that didn't adjust the DEC worm, just the RA. So I've since adjusted DEC. I'm skeptical that it will fix anything, but we'll see. Probably the most useful thing that I did was figure out where the guide camera is pointing. Below the guide scope has Regulus centered, and Skysafari shows where the main scope is pointed. If I wan't something in view of the guide camera I need to place it SW of center.
Mar 27 2019
I've returned the mount to Celestron. Hopefully they will fix what ever issues there are, maybe replace motors / controllers, or even give me a new mount.
I tested the backlash by pointing the scope at a house in the daytime with tracking turned off. The backlash is quite big. For DEC it's 6000, and for RA 12000. I've plugged the DEC value into phd2 and hopefully that will get the calibration working well. I don't see where I can plug it in to PHD2 for RA. That's important as everything seems to depend on good calibration. I'll have to redo all of this once the mount get's back from Celestron, unless of course all they do is reset the firmware. I'm also thinking that I should do an solid alignment and do an all-star polar align before everything as I believe that's what I did for all of the previous good results.
Been thinking about this a bit, and I noticed that all of the good sessions that I've taken pictures of, have lower aggressiveness. It did look like the recent bad guiding was just moving too much. Next time I'm out I'm going to manually enter the backlash values in hopes that I can get a good calibration. I'm also going to pay attention to the aggressiveness especially in RA, and try bringing it down. If I get the same mount back and the RA has not been adjusted, like to re-do the RA worm gear adjustment and try and make it tighter without making it too tight, since it seems to have such a large backlash.
April 10th 2019
I'm not sure what I think. Still not able to get good guiding, still somewhere between 1 and 2 RMS. I was able to get a great polar alignment though. I also increased the guide move size and distance and got much better calibrations. Maybe I need to reduce those a bit? I really need to take more pictures, maybe start logging everything so that I have a better understanding of what is going on. I'm going to try and use the same numbers for aggression, min move when my guiding was really good. I did play with reducing the aggression, and it helped, but still didn't get great results.
Just looked at some of the old settings, and it seems that I did have the same settings for both good guiding and bad. I'm wondering if it's just seeing conditions that are causing my trouble?
April 11th
The more I'm thinking about it, the more I'm thinking that my 0.22 RMA results were just a result of incorrect scale. I may have set the 1600 camera to binning after setting it up, and that may have made the results look artificially good. In any event the results from last night were about the same. Close to 1.5, and I think that the biggest problem was seeing. I was able to get some good calibration results while keeping the move to a smaller value. I did this by having more steps/distance.
I enabled logging, and I compiled / installed phdlogviewer. I wish that I had been saving logs from before so I could get some detail about what was going on when the results were so good. I do have some backups that I'm looking at and see if I can find those old logs...
Yay, found the logs. It really looks like it's purely a mater of bad seeing. The good one is with the asi zwo 120, but it looks like the most important thing here is the white and yellow seeing graph. Amazing!
Seeing is going to be just OK tonight, so I shouldn't expect too much. I'm going to give it a try, and looking at the graph, I'm going to try and reduce the backlash compensation to see if that will reduce the wild swings.
2020 Jan 21
I've largely moved on from the AVX to the Losmandy, but it's been cloudy for some time, and I thought I'd try to improve the AVX again. To avoid any binding caused by the clutch, I 3d printed and installed a TPU flexible washer to lock the DEC down. This means that I need to balance the telescope before installing it on the mount. I mark the center of balance on the dovetail bar, and center that in the clamp. Testing it by pointing it at a streetlight, I am getting the same backlash results ~6000ms wort of pulse. Turning the worm by hand feels much smoother though, so maybe guiding will improve. Who knows?
I"ve also discovered that I can measure the seeing conditions by running the guiding assistant. This is a huge revelation as I never knew if problems were because of seeing or something with the mount or software. Now I know! With the Losmandy I seem to get around 1.5x seeing limitations.
2020 Jan 27
Took it out last night. Seemed to be behaving roughly the same, maybe better, who knows? Seeing was fairly bad at around 1.10, and guiding was around 140 / 150 maybe. So not bad considering the seeing conditions...
2020 Jan 29
I've now modified the RA clutch so that it is similar to the Losmandy. To engage the gears you tighten a hand nut, and to loosen it you loosen the nut. Seems to improve backlash. We'll see...
Well -- it didn't work any better. Still around 1.5 RMS.
- Always do polar alignments.
- All star Align "ASA" seems really good, but I'm moving on to PHD2 drift align, as well as trying KStars Ekos drift alignments.
- Followed some random guys suggestion of removing everything from the AVX, and doing a windmill with both axes. Strangely it did seem to smooth out the movement.
- Be very throughout with the balancing. Pay attention to the position of the mount as it was sometimes actually West heavy when I thought it was East.
- Went all OCD on all the wires. Now they are kept extremely neat and shouldn't interfere with the mount movement.
- Remembered the gain setting on the ZWO. I need to play with that if the frame is too light or dark.
- OK, so the ZWO 120 USB 2 is a big problem. It has incomplete frames that are messing up the guiding. I'm switching to a ZWO ASI 178C so I can guide, and also for color..
- Started getting concerned that the PI is getting in the way of good guiding. Made sure that the little laptop has all the software installed, so that I can try it to see if there is a difference.
- Try using the PI just as an indi server. Run everything on my desktop (KStars / PHD2) and connect to the PI.
- I've since switched to a z8350 Intel mini PC. Seems to work much better performance wise, and it supports usb3 which I will need for the ZWO ASI 1600
- Getting ready to try alignment using KStars plate solving. This looks like the easiest and best way to do this.
- Tried it last night, and it seemed to hang on the solving part. I had set the iso way high, so I could see if the spiral galaxy was centered, maybe that was the issue. I'll bring it down and download the plate solving database next time.
- Run PHD's guide adviser thing, and try doing what it says. Once I get a good reading, I should also try to use PHD's backlash feature.
- I'm getting great results using this. I run the advisor often, and apply the settings. I've done, and redone the drift align until the advisor says that it's under 5 alignment error (I think it was something like 1.2)
- Try getting PEC programmed into the mount.
- I've successfully programed PEC, and it does seem to help with guiding.
- Semi-permanent tripod location: I pounded pipe with flanges into the ground to make the tripod location solid, and the same each time. I'm even going to attempt to use the AVX's hibernate/last alignment feature...
- -Also set the home position. This time I align the right side of the marks in the mount, so there is no slop when starting. -- There is most likely slop in the gears though. Maybe I could slew up and right just before setting/starting...
- Guiding seems to be nicely under 1 pixel now...
To expand on the tripod base, I'd like to have a couple, maybe 3 locations in the yard. If at all possible I'd like them to all have the exact same polar alignment. So to start, I'm trying to find a way to make the tripod perfectly level at each location. For that I'm trying to use a laser level. I adjust the leg height so that the top of the leg ends are each at exactly the same height.
Note, from here on, I'm using the new camera setup. ZWO ASI1600MM / ZWO ASI178MC starting with guiding using the 1600, then moving on to using the 178 with the OAG.
OK, I got a few clear nights to try things out. Bad things come in threes. So first night the computer "Astro" suffered a flash failure. Terrible, one day to recover an older backup, now at least the backup is newer. Next two nights, I tried to do a drift align. Things didn't work out so well. Azimuth was oscillating wildly, and I couldn't get it to calm down. Next night I try and be more through with the initial alignment, but it's still oscillating wildly. I also tried to do both Azimuth and Altitude over several iterations, but it just kept on acting wild. I tried to balance east, but it didn't help. I'm thinking that the issue is the cabling was snagging a bit. I've tweaked the cables, and I'll try and balance perfectly again and I'll try again tonight...
Plan for tonight:
- Check the INDI / PHD east/west guiding setting
- Lock the focus
- Check the Cables
- Check the Balance
- Make sure the calibration succeeds with out error, and with Ra/Dec axis's perpendicular
It worked! It was binning! Once I set the binning to x4 it started behaving normally!!!!
- The binning setting does not seem to be stored. I have to reset it everytime I restart.
- I was able to get it to stick by saving the setting in indi.
- PHD2's dark library only seems to have a current file, so switching between cameras requires a rebuild of the dark library. Maybe I'm missing something...
- Nope, there is one set for each configuration, so you need a config for each camera
- Moving the guide camera away from the prism, and orienting the rectangle of the prism with the rectangle of the sensor seems to get a mostly full field of view.
- I find that I'm struggling to find stars in the guide scope, which is strange because this has not been a problem in the past.
Next night. So I got past the 178 image problem. I was careful not to do anything with the 178 while using kstars/ekos. Nice stars. Now calibrating is the problem:) RA was drifting terribly. I reset the tripod level, as it seemed to be sitting funny in the flanges in the ground. I think that resetting the level may have banged up the polar alignment enough that the drift was so bad that it could not calibrate. Next clear night, should be Sunday, I'll make sure to do an all-star align first, so it's close, then do the phd drift align. I think that I was a bit rushed balancing this night as well, so that may have had some impact. I've spent some time balancing it since, so it seems really well balanced right now..
-- OH, and since I've had to setup new configurations again, I think that I forgot to set DEC to resist-switch... I should attach known good configs to this blog, so I don't loose them.
Feb 18th: Successful Polar align.
Spent a bunch of time balancing, and making sure the wires are not interfering. The mount was also nicely leveled from previous attempts. I also redid the OAG setup so that it will work with both the EdgeHD 8 / .7 reducer, and the William Optics GT81/.8 reducer. The end result was the OAG and main cameras were not both focused. Because of this I decided to do a polar alignment with the main camera, it worked out really well. I first spent quite a bit of time doing a 2 star + 4 calib star alignment, and an all-star polar alignment. That brought me under 5 for the polar alignment. Next I did a drift alignment with PHD. Went very well. Finally I tried to do the whole thing over again with the OAG, but I couldn't get it to focus. I think that it was all fogged up, and I was really tired at this point, so I just called it a night. At least it's nicely polar aligned now. Next night I'll try the whole thing again with the OAG!
Feb 22 2019
Was able to get past the orthagnol error by increasing the pulse time. Then past the"Dec not moving enough" by increasing the side reel rate on both the mount and PhD. I tweaked the gain in the 178 and the stars came through great. Calibration was great but guiding not so good. The polar alignment from last night was still great. I did a one star, not even perfectly centered, then platesolved! In the end I tried to take a photo and the 1600 was solid white in kstars, but not in PhD????
- Reloaded the configuration files for kstars/indi/phd2 and the 1600 seems to be working fine. I also tried to reinstall the firmware on the 1600, but there was no option available, but was able to access the camera from windows.
- Re-did the spacing of the guide/imaging camera so that it should be able to easily switch from EdgeHD to GT81. I was able to focus nicely with both at the streetlight. Will have to fine tune next time out.
- Had a thought about guiding the AVX. Maybe I need to to an allstar after a PHD2 drift align, and just accept the results. Will that change the tracking rates? Have to try next time
- Made many configurations for different binning, on the 178 so that each will retain it's own settings.
- Made a new spot for the computer further up the tube and more solid. Will have to re-balance, but it should be better.
- Plan for next night is:
- Balance nicely
- Do 2 star + 4 calib nicely then check the PA. If good then run AS, and just accept the result.
- Hopefully the guiding is good. If yes them maybe, just maybe start to take some LRGB images of galaxies? Or if moon is out, narrow band of Nebula?
Mar 12 2019
It's been a while. It was a somewhat mistake laden night, but there were some successes. Guiding was pretty much the same. I was using .75 sidereal and 2x binning (maybe -- see mistake laden TM). I did manage to get a photo of a galaxy in Leo using the awful guiding...
- Strange
- So it seems that phd2 has a bug where it does not understand the bad pixel map settings for bin=3. It gives an error when the darks were generated with bin=3. If you set the camera to bin=1 it gives no error. I'm hoping that I can just ignore the error in this case.
- Also note that I need to confirm the INDI bin settings when I'm switching profiles.
- Successes
- Balanced nicely
- 1600 was taking pictures just fine
- Spacing was awesome. Focus is now perfect on both the 1600 and the guide camera, and can be swapped between scopes without having to sync the guide/main cameras!!!
- The new spot is working really well. I can look through the finder much easier, and it's more solid etc etc.
- Not so successes
- Guiding looked the same -- Bad
- Doing the AS sync didn't seem to help
- I didn't to the adjustment suggestions per the PHD how-to's I'll have to try those next time
- Plan for tonight.
- Try this again: Do 2 star + 4 calib nicely then check the PA. If good then run AS, and just accept the result.
- Try .75 SR, 2x Bin again, and be very carefull to make sure it's all correct
- Follow the calibration suggestions
- If that fails, try tweaking the 178 gain / offset settings
- If that fails try with 3x Bin, then 4x Bin
- If that fails, and I'm still awake, try swapping the 178 for the 120 :(
Much better guiding results tonight, but still bad. Total RMS = 2.55 (1.78"). This night I was using 0.75 sidereal and 2x Bin. It started out worse, and so I decided to redo the drift alignment even though it was not terrible. I ended up adjusting it quite a bit, and got it down below 5 which was great. I also found that the best way to align the mount is to just do a "quick align" with the scope in the home position, then plate solve. Another thing I found was that I could successfully balance East by adjusting the weight and get feedback from the PHD graph to stop adjusting as soon as the guiding is all in one direction.
- 0.75 SR, 2x Bin
- Results better, but still bad RMS Total 2.55
- Try again tonight with 3x Bin.
- If the results are still bad, then try with the zwo 1600 and see if the results are better there.
- Looking closer at the graph, it seems that the mount is moving too much with each adjustment. I'm going to check the sidereal rate in phd and on the scope. Also maybe make the min move higher
Mar 14th 2019
Not so much success tonight. So I was able to plate solve really well, but when I calibrated, the alignment was pretty far out, so I spent some time aligning. I tried to increase the min move for RA and it did help somewhat, but still not great. RMS came down to maybe 1.5 from 3. I started getting caught up tweaking all of those parameters, and it was a mistake really. I think that it was a wast of time... Next night I'm going to use the 1600 main camera and see if the guiding is fantastic there like it was before -- this might tell me something about using an OAG, or the 178 camera. I'm also going to try and turn off binning and see where that goes. Maybe try the 120mm if that does not work. Also I'd like to try using the 178 as the main camera image train and guide with that. If that works, then there is something about using the OAG that's getting me.
Mar 15th 2019
Some interesting results. Polar alignment seemed to be still good. I got roughly the same guiding performance with the 178, I also noticed that not binning at all, I was getting better results. I switched to the 1600. Set binning to 4, and low and behold, the results were still roughly the same as the 178. So I decided to turn in before midnight. Today I'm following the advice of PHD2, and I'm adjusting the mount gears to remove some of the backlash. So far I think that I've removed quite a lot of it in bot RA and DEC. I also removed the extra dove tail, and reballanced the weight by putting the computer on the front of the scope. Hopefully tonight will go much better...Mar 15th 2019
OK, so I'm adjusting things, and I notice something strange. RA rates seem to differ between directions. Right on the handset takes 1:00 min for one full rotation, and 3 min 20 sec in the left direction.
Mar 16th 2019
Tragedy strikes! I take apart the mount and adjust the gears. Seems to help, but the RA speed in different directions is really bad. I try resetting the connection and it seems to work. Next I adjust the worm gear, as I can't to much with the other RA gear. I do this, and later that night the mount is behaving terribly. It lurches and jumps. I give up for the night. Next night I go in and very carefully re-adjust the worm. It turns much more freely, and when I test slewing, it seems to be acting great, so I'm now waiting for another clear night to try it again...
Mar 20th 2019
Not much different. So I get everything back together and I'm up and running. Everything seems to be working normal now. No improvement really. Guiding is around 2.00 RMS. PHD2 is complaining about dec backlash. Funny thing is that didn't adjust the DEC worm, just the RA. So I've since adjusted DEC. I'm skeptical that it will fix anything, but we'll see. Probably the most useful thing that I did was figure out where the guide camera is pointing. Below the guide scope has Regulus centered, and Skysafari shows where the main scope is pointed. If I wan't something in view of the guide camera I need to place it SW of center.
I've returned the mount to Celestron. Hopefully they will fix what ever issues there are, maybe replace motors / controllers, or even give me a new mount.
I tested the backlash by pointing the scope at a house in the daytime with tracking turned off. The backlash is quite big. For DEC it's 6000, and for RA 12000. I've plugged the DEC value into phd2 and hopefully that will get the calibration working well. I don't see where I can plug it in to PHD2 for RA. That's important as everything seems to depend on good calibration. I'll have to redo all of this once the mount get's back from Celestron, unless of course all they do is reset the firmware. I'm also thinking that I should do an solid alignment and do an all-star polar align before everything as I believe that's what I did for all of the previous good results.
Been thinking about this a bit, and I noticed that all of the good sessions that I've taken pictures of, have lower aggressiveness. It did look like the recent bad guiding was just moving too much. Next time I'm out I'm going to manually enter the backlash values in hopes that I can get a good calibration. I'm also going to pay attention to the aggressiveness especially in RA, and try bringing it down. If I get the same mount back and the RA has not been adjusted, like to re-do the RA worm gear adjustment and try and make it tighter without making it too tight, since it seems to have such a large backlash.
April 10th 2019
I'm not sure what I think. Still not able to get good guiding, still somewhere between 1 and 2 RMS. I was able to get a great polar alignment though. I also increased the guide move size and distance and got much better calibrations. Maybe I need to reduce those a bit? I really need to take more pictures, maybe start logging everything so that I have a better understanding of what is going on. I'm going to try and use the same numbers for aggression, min move when my guiding was really good. I did play with reducing the aggression, and it helped, but still didn't get great results.
Just looked at some of the old settings, and it seems that I did have the same settings for both good guiding and bad. I'm wondering if it's just seeing conditions that are causing my trouble?
April 11th
The more I'm thinking about it, the more I'm thinking that my 0.22 RMA results were just a result of incorrect scale. I may have set the 1600 camera to binning after setting it up, and that may have made the results look artificially good. In any event the results from last night were about the same. Close to 1.5, and I think that the biggest problem was seeing. I was able to get some good calibration results while keeping the move to a smaller value. I did this by having more steps/distance.
I enabled logging, and I compiled / installed phdlogviewer. I wish that I had been saving logs from before so I could get some detail about what was going on when the results were so good. I do have some backups that I'm looking at and see if I can find those old logs...
Yay, found the logs. It really looks like it's purely a mater of bad seeing. The good one is with the asi zwo 120, but it looks like the most important thing here is the white and yellow seeing graph. Amazing!
Seeing is going to be just OK tonight, so I shouldn't expect too much. I'm going to give it a try, and looking at the graph, I'm going to try and reduce the backlash compensation to see if that will reduce the wild swings.
2020 Jan 21
I've largely moved on from the AVX to the Losmandy, but it's been cloudy for some time, and I thought I'd try to improve the AVX again. To avoid any binding caused by the clutch, I 3d printed and installed a TPU flexible washer to lock the DEC down. This means that I need to balance the telescope before installing it on the mount. I mark the center of balance on the dovetail bar, and center that in the clamp. Testing it by pointing it at a streetlight, I am getting the same backlash results ~6000ms wort of pulse. Turning the worm by hand feels much smoother though, so maybe guiding will improve. Who knows?
I"ve also discovered that I can measure the seeing conditions by running the guiding assistant. This is a huge revelation as I never knew if problems were because of seeing or something with the mount or software. Now I know! With the Losmandy I seem to get around 1.5x seeing limitations.
2020 Jan 27
Took it out last night. Seemed to be behaving roughly the same, maybe better, who knows? Seeing was fairly bad at around 1.10, and guiding was around 140 / 150 maybe. So not bad considering the seeing conditions...
2020 Jan 29
I've now modified the RA clutch so that it is similar to the Losmandy. To engage the gears you tighten a hand nut, and to loosen it you loosen the nut. Seems to improve backlash. We'll see...
Next! How about this! Put a bearing in the bottom end, and 3D print parts to make it fit. Does it work better? No, not really. Still around 1.5RMS
Next! replace the worm gear in the RA as the original seems to have some rough spots.
Does it work Better? NO! just about the same! Around 1.5RMS. Man am I glad I got the Losmandy!
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