Explore Scientific TDM Telescope Drive Master VER. 2.5

By drastically reducing drive errors, the Telescope Drive Master puts 1 arc-second tracking ability within your reach without asking you to give up your existing mount.

The Telescope Drive Master (TDM) is the vision of accomplished Hungarian amateur astronomers, Istvan Papp & Attila Madai of MDA Telescoop. It was their desire to solve the problem of tracking imperfections that, to some degree or another, are inherent in all equatorial mounts, and the Telescope Drive Master was the result. The TDM is designed to attach to a range of popularly available equatorial mounts through the use of a separately purchased mount-specific adapter. The Telescope Drive Master™ uses 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 TMD 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 TDM can easily improve it down to 2-to-2.5 arc-seconds peak-to-valley - which is what you would expect from equatorial mounts that cost many thousands of dollars. In many cases, that number will drop even further to 1 arc-second.