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My New 12? Meade LX200 ACF GPS telescope does not have the two screw?s in the front and the rear of the top of the main optical tube for mounting a dovetail plate to the top center or does it have screws on the right side for mounting the finder scope on ether side like my 10? and 8? scopes had. There is only one screw in the front and back located in the optical tube not the soiled black main back or the soiled black corrector plate ring in the front. Is this the way they are making them now or is this a manufacture mistake, because if this is so you will not even be able to mount Meade?s dovetail mounting plate for all the mounting plates I have researched all have to have two screws that go all the way through the plate and the curved mounting blocks ion to the scopes front and back. If you know anything about this I would like to know because Meade does not even know the anser. Thanks, Laurence
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That is an old Japanese spotter scope. I don't know if I would spend any time trying to fix it Back about a year ago they were selling for $35 dollars or so.
You should train the drives, and purchase a separate 12 volt power pack with the correct cigarette lighter style power cable. Calibrate motors BEFORE you train the drives with the same power source you will use outside at night.
If this is a GPS model-- and new--- I would execute a RESET on the hand controller-- calibrate motors and train the drives and take the scope outside and get a Satellite link and do a two star automatic alignment.
Make SURE you are centering the correct alignment stars. By the way TRAINING must be done in alt az mode before you put the scope on a wedge-- it cannot be done in polar mode.
If it will not boot-up it's probably the main board. However, I would try a brand new hand controller cable first before I panic.
A fellow by the name of Ron Sampson can repair the hand controller and or the main board circuits. He can be contacted by placing a message for him on the LX200 and the LX90 Yahoo Tech Group.
Hope that helps you. You can send him the hand controller and the main board and he will have a look at it.
Did you calibrate the motors and TRAIN the drives? If not do these first--
During alignment the "alignment" stars may or may NOT be visible in the eyepiece-- CENTER the star. Once you do this with two stars your gotos should be good.
You have a standard lx200 problem. If you transported your scope a lot with the drives "locked" it damages the RA and DEC drives. If you keep using it, the motors burn out and start drawing too much current. This sometimes blows the motor driver chips on the motherboard which are getting very rare.
The burned out tantalum caps can be replaced with better aluminum electrolytics very cheaply. If the ones in your Autostar burned out, they often burn up the ribbon cable. Also, they often take out U11, a 74LS14 chip on the motherboard. Also a cheap repair. You should take the Autostar apart. If they are burned up, it will be obvious. If your ribbon cable survived, you should replace the caps with aluminum electrolytics. I believe they are 6.8 uf.
So, if you can work an ohmmeter, measure the resistance of the two drive motors with the plugs unplugged. If it is about 14 ohms they are ok. If they are about 3 or 4 ohms, they are toast. Check the worm drives for end play. If there is just a little, you can adjust them. The battery jack on the control panel often breaks the solder joints on the board, causing one of the problems you describe. You can check that and replace/resolder as necessary. The on/off switch often fails and gets intermittent. These are also cheap and can be replaced. I don't repair these for a living but I repair a few of them for friends in the club. These are pretty common problems.
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