I'm still a beginner in astronomy and inspired by an article in a German online magazine I bougth 2 years ago a Skywatcher AZ-GTi with a Skymax-102 Maksutov.
In the meantime I also a Evoguide 50ED and started with my first deepsky experiences.
First I used astroberry and now I have a Mele Quieter 3Q with Ubuntu-22.04 using Jasem's ppa.
My AZ-GTi is still in AZ mode.
With this equipment I'm very happy because it was good starting point for me and I learnd a lot.
For the moment it would be all I need but I run very often in the tracking problems discribe in
AZ-GTI in AZ-mode tracking problems
So I'm thinking about replacing my AZ-GTi against the Star Adventurer GTI.
Now I would like to ask here if this replacement is useful?
Hi Peter, have you considered adding a EQ ‘wedge’ to your AZGTi and updating the mount firmware for use in EQ mode? Many AZGTi owners do this and get pretty good performance. It seems that the final quality control of the manufacture of these mounts varies, so some perform better than others. When the Star Adventurer GTi was launched, some purchasers were hopeful that the performance would be better than the AZGTi in EQ mode, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. There is also evidence that dismantling the SA GTi is much more risky than dismantling the AZGTi (there are several YouTube videos about this for the AZGTi where people have improved the DEC guiding performance).
When using the AZGTis in EQ mode I use an EQDirect cable and the EQMOD driver in Ekos. The EQMOD driver is also used with lots of other mounts and I haven’t heard of any tracking issues….
Yes - for both. I know that people have invested in much more expensive wedges (eg William Optics or iOptron). The SW wedges may not be as sturdy as the others but I find they do the job very well. I regularly and easily get to polar alignment better than 1 arc min which is totally adequate at the focal length I am usually working (275mm).