Hi,
at the moment I'm working with the EQ6-R. So far the mount is quite good, but with my C9.25 it is at the limit. So I'm thinking of getting a bigger mount (perhaps next year...) I'm thinking of the EQ8-R. One of the reasons is, that I'm currently building a permanent pier in the garden, so it would be for a permanent setup.
Are there experiencies in the forum which are the differencies in the work flow within kstars from people who owned both of them? Is it just a switch and just "having a bigger mount"? Or are there obstacles when you are used to have the smaller EQ6-R?
The other question is: are there alternatives? Of course there are, but I'm satisfied so far with the EQ6, so I'm hoping to be so with the EQ8 Is this ok?
I switched from HEQ5 to EQ8 (the older model) and at least there is was very much plug & play, nothing changed except additional capabilities like possibility to autohome (which is very useful in a remote observatory) and so on.
Autohome works well, I've had to use it a few times after I've messed up the mount state somehow (usually cutting power at wrong time). If the mount is pointing totally wrong way, I usually first manually run the scope roughly in the right position so that it doesn't hit the pier or anything while it finds the home sensors. As said I have the older EQ8, but as far as I know it should work the same with EQ8-R too if the mount code has been added so that the driver detects the capabilities correctly.
My older model only has USB in the handset so I need to still use the same RJ45 EQDir cable I used with HEQ5, but EQ8-R has additional USB-B in the mount as well and can be used directly with EQMod with just USB-A-B cable. Difference is that baud rate needs to be set to 115k instead of 9600 used with EQDir cable but otherwise it should work exactly the same.