Mount Recommendations under £5k

[ribuck]

Hi all,

 

I have a max budget of around £5k for a new mount and i'm looking for recommendations.  My imaging payload will be a 10" Quattro with a little 72mm FRA400 riding shotgun and my total rig will weigh about 23kg ish ( approx 50lbs) 

 

In the past i had one of the first EQ8's and it was terrible, suffered from really bad backlash and i recently tried a CEM70 which was fault out of the box as it shorted out the mount every time i slewed west of the meridian.

 

I loved the CEM70's performance as wen i slewed east of the is shorted out less, and i was able to do a little bit of testing and it guided exceptionally well, where i saw it as low as 0.29" with the little 72mm that i tested with.  

 

I know i was probably just unlucky, but after having 2 duff mounts i'm a little nervous about my next purchase.

 

I'll probably just end up buying another CEM70, but this time from Altair as i believe they are a Ioptron repair centre, so better placed to help if there are any issues, but wondered if anyone had any other recommendations under £5k for a 23kg (50lb) Imaging payload.

 

Cheers,

Rich.

 

 

[TerryMcK]

The CQ350 from Skywatcher is good for 35kg and comes in at around £2500. Not heard any bad reports about it but it is relatively new.

 

[ribuck]

it looks like a great mount for the money, but the fact that the power and usb inputs are on a moving part of the mount makes it a no go for me as i've had my fair share of cable snags over the years that have ruined my imaging sessions during the night.

 

If they had of just followed the same idea as Ioptron and put these as static connectors in the base then i would have bought one as i much prefer EQASCOM to Ioptrons Commander software.