Using a Meade Mount w/ TeleVue TV 76

I was about to purchase a TelePod Encoder set-up with the Sky Tour Computer, until yesterday, when I was at the local mall. I went into a Discovery Channel Store and looked at their telescope line. Among the scopes I saw a small Meade refractor. It was the NGC 60. It had a computer built into the mount and was less than $200.00. That's less than the encoders from TeleVue. Today I found the same Meade scope on the internet for $134.95!!
Has anyone bought one of these cheap scopes just to salvage the XY positioning system? Is there a better unit than the one I am looking at? Should I scrap this idea and just spend the $700.00 or so for the computer from TeleVue?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

If you check the archives on the Televue Yahoo group you'll find some discussion of this if I remember correctly. There is some "engineering" involved, put several folks have retrofitted the TV refractors to less expensive go-to mounts.

Hi George -

The NGC's are not really a goto mount, they are more like built in digital setting circles. The NGC mount's are pretty lousy.

You might want to investigate using a Meade DS-80 mount, which is an Autostar-controlled mount designed for an 80mm refractor. They can be found for around $200 as well, and mate quite well to the televue 76.

There are several folks who have done this on the "Meade-DS-Telescopes" Yahoo group with the TV76.

-Jake