Explore Scientific TDM Telescope Drive Master Encoder Only

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Your Price: CAD1,372.91

Retail Price:CAD1,414.10

Your Savings:CAD41.19(3%)

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Part Number:721001

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The Explore Scientific Telescope Drive Master, or TDM is designed to attach to popularly available equatorial mounts, such as the Celestron CGE & CGE Pro, as well as mounts by Synta, iOptron and Meade. The Telescope Drive Master (TDM) uses a mount-specific adapter, an ultra-high resolution encoder and an electronics package that transforms your drive system into a super-performance, research-grade drive. This device does not require tedious PEC training. Just turning on the TDM eliminates nearly all of the periodic and non-periodic tracking error of your equatorial mount.

The Telescope Master Drive electronic controller unit compares the incoming signals from the high precision rotary encoder, which is mounted onto the RA shaft, with the time signal of its quartz oscillator. Any deviations of the angular velocity of the RA shaft from the prescribed drive rate are compensated by feedback regulation in real time by accelerating or slowing down the drive. If further correction is needed because of errors other than periodic drive error, the TDM allows auto-guider input as well.

A typical drive on a moderately-priced equatorial mount can easily have 20-30 arc seconds (or more) of periodic error. The Telescope Drive Master can easily improve it down to 2-to-2.5 arc-seconds peak-to-valley or less, which is what you would expect from equatorial mounts that cost many thousands of dollars.

You can download TDM Monitor Software free of charge! This program can read TDM correction values in real-time via the PC serial port (or via RS232-USB adapter) from USART Port of TDM box. The installation package contains the LabView runtime environment as well for using this application. In this way, the user can check the tracking error of any mount in real time in his/her warm room (without autoguider support). There are two versions of TDM Monitor: v1.0 with +/-16" (1/8" resolution) or v2.31. Both have +/-16" (1/8" resolution) and +/-32" (1/4" resolution) range of tracking deviation display. Before installation, it is recommended to read "ReadMeFirst.txt" file.