I just received a brand new GM811G and took it outside for first light yesterday.? After successfully polar aligning the mount with a polemaster, I tried to goto several bright stars and each time the mount slewed in a direction that was nearly opposite of where it needed to point.? For example, starting from the CWT down position, I tried to goto Altair (high in the southeast) and the mount tried to slew so the scope would point at the ground in the west.? I eventually had to stop the goto to prevent the scope from crashing.? I've never seen this occur on any other equatorial mount I have owned.

This happened multiple times from the CWT down position trying to go to different stars.? I restarted the mount several times and made sure that everything obvious (I think) was set correctly.? The RA and Dec cables are plugged in correctly, mount type, lat and longitude, date and time are all correct, polar alignment is good, etc.??

Eventually, I disengaged the clutches and manually moved the scope to the star I had directed the mount to goto, Arcturus.? With the mount thinking it was at Arcturus, I retightened the clutches and tried to goto Mizar.? In this instance, the mount reached the correct R.A. for Mizar (I think), but went much too far to the east in Declination.??

I spent two hours trying to get these problems fixed at a dark sky site and ultimately gave up and headed home.? I am out of ideas on this.? What should I check next?? Could this be something that updating the firmware in the controller would fix?

Ryan