OK, change my mind. I surrender!

So I've gone back and forth many times with the AVX. Sometimes I can get it to guide great, others terrible! I then tried to do a "hyper-tune" of the mount. And after several months, it only seems worse. It's got to the point where I just want to do some photography. So I decided to get a "good" mount, and one that can handle the telescopes that I have, and maybe others. Introducing the GM811g!!!!

So far it did not disappoint:

So it didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped, but when does it? 

Soon after the above photos, everything went to hell. 

One night the DEC axis felt loose, and when I turned it I heard rubbing. PHD2 would not even calibrate, it said just forget it. I ended up trying to follow the worm gear adjustment video to no avail. I couldn't get the play out. The setting circle was also rubbing so bad that I had to remove it. Not good, not good at all. 

So I sent an e-mail to Losmandy. After a few days I didn't get a response, so I called them. The lady on the phone put on Mr Losmandy himself, and he listened to my description of the problem. He quickly figured out what was wrong, and told me what to do to bring it back under adjustment. After the call I tried following the instructions, but I couldn't get it to work. I got it as good as I could get, and after several terrible nights, I dug deeper. I now realize that he was giving me the right instructions, but I did not realize the screws that needed to be adjusted. After loosing up two screws on the Dec, and adjusting the position of the block, everything came in to place. I was able to adjust it nice and tight, while the motor was able to turn freely. Very nice. I was also able to put back the setting circle. 

The next few nights, I was ready to do some photography, but a variety of things continued to go wrong. The mini PC started crashing. Turned out to be a bad power supply. That fixed, I was then not able to take more than one photo with out it crashing. It was really bad. So after poking around for a while, I realized that KStars was not configured to use PHD2, so it was keeping each guide photo in memory waiting for me to look at it. Eventually it just crashed, after running terribly slow for sometime causing PHD to misbehave and guiding to go bad. Next guiding seemed terrible. I realized that PHD2 had "reverse direction after meridian flip" checked. I unckecked it, and boom, guiding was pretty good. I also played with the 178 camera settings and found that using 16bit raw was a vast improvement in the guide images. 

Wow, so here I am now. After all these things were fixed, everything seems to be running fairly smoothly. It's in a loop taking 30 180s photos of the dumbell nebula using an H-Alpha filter. The images look glorious. Guiding seems to be staying under 1s RMS which is not stellar, but good enough considering. I'll spend some time at some point addressing guiding again. It seems to take occasional wild excursions. I have no idea why... But still most of the photos look pretty good. 

Aug 14th, 

So I spent some time last night, and I resolved the wild excursions. The worm was too tight. From what I've read, the GM811G is sensitive to temperature. I adjusted the worm on a hot day, and it seemed pretty good. When I checked it last night, it was really tight. So I re-did the adjustment after it sat outside for several hours fully cooled down. The the wild excursions stopped! (well except for when clouds got in the way). So the seeing was terrible, but I still managed to get RMS values around 1, so pretty good. Here's the latest dumbbell. 

Oct 4th -- Maybe? 

Now switching to the GT81 things are looking really good. I've discovered after several attempts, that the DEC worm needs to be adjusted frequently, maybe even every night or two. Also it seems to do just fine if it's fairly loose, but will fail terribly when it's too tight. 0.26 RMS -- Really?