Sunday 19th May AWR Drive problems solved.

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Problem solved! The simplest answer really was the correct one. Several LST calculators were showing the same LST. So AWR must be wrong. There was no other answer.

Going back into the AWR menus showed my local time for UT. That certainly wasn't correct!  So I reduced UT by 2 hours in AWR's menus. The wrong coordinates immediately showed on the IH2 screen. That is, until I Synced on the manually [paddle] centred sun in C-Du-C. The coordinates then showed correctly. As did LST in AWR. Finally!

All in agreement at last! This is not a minor event. I have been struggling with the Goto aspect of the AWR drives from the very beginning. I was convinced it was my own fault that they could not manage a Goto slew to find a target as big as the Moon or Sun. You would not believe the times I have measured the altitude of the PA and the north pointing of the mounting. Including the allowance for 3° of easterly magnetic declination. I checked them both again this morning! This involved a double stretch ladder and two builder's 2m, straight edges! Measuring north accurately is no trivial matter with a raised observatory!

Having broken the back of drive problem I then proved the drive system with numerous returns to the Parking Point. Home: SetP[ar]K then slewing back to the Sun and then back again. And again! By Syncing on the Sun after the telescope returned and had pointed perfectly it was able to return to the parking place and back again with repeated, perfect centring precision.

This is quite a slew from horizontal east pointing to high in the south west. The RA motor runs for quite a while before it stops and leaves the rest to the Declination motor. And [for once] it didn't try to go around the pole and turn the OTA upside down! A reflector would have needed heavy duty mirror clamps simply to have survived this long!

AWR needs to be UNPARKed  before C-Du-C can slew again: The question remains why UT in AWR became two hours fast. I shall have to edit the last two posts because they duplicate so many details as I sought an answer to the problems. Finally, AWR can remember the parking position when switched off and can slew to a target from a cold start. This is another first! I thought it just had as bad a memory as my own! I kept wanting to replace the button battery in the box in case that helped.

Chris Lord once said that you don't get a finished, Goto drive system from AWR. You buy an unfinished, DIY project. I would add a 72 page, unindexed manual and no inbuilt object database. The mounting's movements [slews] are also very slow. Ideal [probably] for a very large instrument but not one of more typical, amateur dimensions. Having both axes running is quicker but it's still an achingly slow 2 minutes per 90 degrees of sky.

I might have changed the parking position to point at the N Pole. Just to try and reduce the waiting time before it can find the Sun or Moon. But that would fill the southern half of the observatory dome with telescopes. At least the easterly pointing parking spot is well above my head height. In fact I really need to stretch to touch or adjust the telescopes. Just the price of having large refractors, I suppose.

BTW: The sun was blank in WL.