Fare thee well, Cube - farewell high tech

OK - been there, done that, and indeed, I guess I angered the gods. (For why I choose the Ioptron "Smart Cube" as a mount for two small refractors, see this post.

Here's why I'm sending it back and going with a more expensive, low-tech solution. I'm not angry with Ioptron or the retail supplier. I'm glad someone is trying to produce a mount like this. There's a need for it. But I'm not ready to be a beta tester. I want something that works correctly now and is hassle free. So good luck folks - I'm heading elsewhere.

When I first set the Cube up indoors I had a problem. The connection of the controller to the Cube kept falling out. Frustrating because you would start an alignment procedure, then the Cube would turn off and you would have to start all over again. But no big problem, there was a second connecting point right next to the first and that one fit well. (Why this redundancy ? I don't know.)

Uh oh! The star choices it's giving me for alignment are all wrong. These stars aren't visible at this time. But they have a curious little provision where, when setting up, you tell it whether or not you are "ahead" of or "behind' GMT. Since you have already entered your longitude I'm not sure why this is necessary, but I certainly consider myself "behind" GMT and that's how I had answered the question. But in the spirit of experiment, I say I'm ahead of it. Aha. That's what it wanted to hear. (Wonder if this has anything to do with writing backwards? ) Now we have the right stars. I do a two-star alignment and the Cube seems to point in the right general direction. It gives me an approving nod and I tell it to go to a familiar object, such as M42. Again it seems to point in the right direction. Great.

Next morning, same procedure. Only this time it gives me the wrong stars again, so this time I answer the question about GMT the way I think it should be answered, and now I have the right stars. Hey - maybe it was suffering jet lag last night? Maybe it had just flown in from China? I do another two-star alignment and and a few practice "go tos" - all inside, of course - and it seems to point in the right directions. My confidence grows. Hey, the tripod legs are downright dinky, and short, but . . .

Well - maybe I need to experiment with that short business. I've been trying this with the AT66, my smallest scope. How does it do with the Orion 80ED? That scope has a 600mm focal length and the bottom line is it looks a bit big for the Cube and when pointing high in the sky, the eyepiece is so low the best way to use it is to sit on the ground on a boat cushion. Well - I can live with that. No signs of stress, but I decide that I won't press my luck - I'll consider the main purpose of the Cube is to carry the AT66. I won't ask it to do any hevaier lifting.

Fine - and now it is Friday night, I'm familiar with the Cube, and the skies have suddenly cleared. Not in the forecast, but . . , here goes. I take the Cube and AT66 to the observing deck. I ask it to do a two-star alignment and run into a minor irritation. Not many choices, but I take Aldebaran as my first star, quite high in the east. I then decide to go to Pollux, reasonably far away and lower in the east. No - it won't let me. That was one of the stars offered, but since my first star was east, it now says my second star must be in the west. That really narrows the choices, but I choose one from Andromeda. The Cube turns. Uh oh. Behind a tree. Can't use it. We . . . T's another star in Aires. It's visible, but frankly it looks closer to Aldebaran than Pollux was. But it's in the west. Second irritation. If there's a way to reject one choice and make another it isn't clear to me. But then, the directions are poor.

So I turn the Cube off and start over again. (OH - did I mention that some times it holds the time from day to day and sometimes it doesn't? It seems to be holding it now pretty well. That's a positive. ) By now Aldebaran has crossed the meridian, so it won't let me choose a second star in the west. I have to choose one from the east. I understand this rule, but since there are only a handful of stars to choose from I find this a bit mindless. The idea with most mounts is to choose stars that are fairly far apart. By just making the decision based on east and west you can choose stars fairly close together.

In any event, my second star is Betelgeuse and my first "go to" target is a very short hop to M42. It misses by about five degrees. OK, I'll use the manual button to scroll there. Enter the fatal flaw. I scroll to M42, release the button, and the Cube, entirely own now, heads back in the direction it came from. It will absolutely not let me scroll to a target. It's fine when I'm doing scrolling to the alignment stars, but once it's gone on its own if it says it's gone to the correct target, then that's the end of the story. It will not let me correct its error. It does this over and over again. I restart. I realign. I use different stars. i use different manual scrolling speeds. It doesn't matter. When I scroll it to something it reverses my effort.

A phone call to the retailer I purchased it from results in a suggestion that I contact Ioptron. They think this is a firmware problem. There's probably a new version of the firmware I can download. But I'm not as forgiving as many amateur astronomers seem to be. I know this thing is selling at a bargain basement price. It looks like I got what I paid for and I didn't pay enough, so I didn't get enough. The behavior is just too flakey and I have already put in far too much time experimenting with it. I am not going to call Ioptron and fiddle around with trying to find a cable to make an appropriate download to update firmware, and then find out that may or may not be the problem. The supplier, Opt Corp, agrees to refund my money. They were very good about this.

The bottom line for me is I've already seen enough problems assuming all works well to make me uncomfortable with my decision to purchase the Cube. The tripod is too dinky and the choices of alignment stars far too few for my location where trees frequently obscure a star. If it had worked as advertised I would have kept it and lived with the shortcomings that are simply representative of the low price. Not working, it's going back.

What can I replace it with? That was not an easy decision. There seems to be two basic types of manual Alt-Az mounts out there, both expensive. The first depends on setting tension to create just the right amount of friction to make it so the scope moves smoothly. These types can cost from $150 to $1,200 without a tripod. I have one such mount - the low end type - and while I like it, I do find setting the tension a pain, especially as you change eyepieces, or altitude. Maybe others work better. The second type of drive uses this tension arrangement only for crude positioning. You then fine tune - and follow a star - by turning a knob that works a gear. Even on the cheap AZ-3 type mount, I find this geared approach better - smoother and more reliable for tracking. Problem with the AZ-3 is the gear doesn't have much travel and it usually hits the end of the line just when you are starting to enjoy yourself. When this happens you have to back it up and reposition the scope manually. That's a pain.

The Vixen Porta mount looks like the best bet, but it goes for $400. When you consider the AT66 cost $350 - I got it used for $250 - that seems like a big chunk of change. (I mean the Cube cost $242. This manual mount has no computer, or electronic tracking. )

Then I saw that AstronomyTechnologies was introducing a mount that seems to be a direct competitor to the Vixen. It's called an Astro_Tech Voyager and can be found here. I have an Astro-Tech scope and I've bought separately their diagonal and one-power finder and I like all three products. They seem both well made and reasonably priced. The Voyager is $299. That still seems to me about twice as much as I should pay for a manual, alt-az mount, but frankly, that's cheap in terms of the market. So I bite my tongue and order one. Stay tuned. I think the gods are trying to get me to simplify. Well, this looks simpler. Let's see if it works as advertised!