I bought one couple years back. It was an unqualified
disaster and I cannot recommend it. It is possible I just got
a bad one, but I emphasize that nearly everything on it
was defective. Perhaps their Q/C has improved, but I
have no data on that. I think you would do well to look
elsewhere.
Here is a condensed review I wrote sometime back:
My ETX-90 (also from Meade) has been fun and is an eminently
usable scope, so I had high hopes for the DS-114.
The reality has been woefully disappointing. While the
DS114 is beautifully designed and well thought-out,
the quality of construction is very poor, and the scope and
mount (at least my one sample) is more or less useless.
Optics: Primary mirror has about 3 waves of astigmatism;
secondary about 1/2 wave astigmatism. On the positive side,
both the primary and secondary have nice adjustments -- if
it had good mirrors, you could adjust them properly. Also,
the primary has the most pristine mirror surface I've
ever seen; it is really too bad the figure is so awful.
Finder: the finder objective has huge amount of spherical aberration.
I thought maybe they had the lens in backwards, but that wasn't it.
If you stop the lens down from 30mm to about 8mm the spherical
aberration goes away, but then images are very dim.
Mount: This scope has an alt-az mount. The altitude axis is a
metal fork with two bearings, and a plastic cradle that holds
the scope. On mine the two trunnions of the altitude axis were
badly misaligned, so that it was very hard to make the scope
go below about 30 degrees elevation. The bearings would
grind and grunt and move in jerks. It turns out this also makes
the electronic drive (Autostar) more-or-less useless, since the
setup procedure requires you to "train" the telescope on a
terrestrial target. I could not see any way to adjust the
bearings.
The stiffness of the altitude motion led to other problems
before I figured out what was going on. Part of the drive
includes a worm gear which is held in place by two brass
nuts with nylon inserts. The extra torque on these caused
the nuts to come loose, and it was very difficult to get
them tightened properly again. Apparently the nylon inserts
don't hold so well after they've been threaded and un-threaded
a few times. This must be a common problem, since the
instruction manual included a one page addendum explaining
that you might need to re-tighten these nuts (but I could
not get them to stay tight for more than a few slews).
I eventually found that some Locktite 242 and teflon
plumbers tape in the threads seemed to help.
I also had problems getting the altitude axis clutch to
hold. Someone on Weasner's ETX site mention putting a leather
washer in the altitude clutch assembly to get more friction,
and this seemed to help.
Battery pack: the plug on supplied battery pack was intermittent.
Whenever the telescope tried to move, the power would flick
off, and the controller would re-initialize itself.
Autostar controller: position error on "goto" slews was very
large -- about 10% (i.e. 90 degree slew gave error of about
10 degrees). This may have been related to other problems
with the altitude axis.
Also in my plans to get this scope was the prospect of
mounting a small high-quality refractor (TV85) on the mount.
Ultimately I realized there was so much vibration from the
stepper motors, that tracking with this mount was worthless.
There was no point in trying to mount a good OTA on it.
At these prices, I did not expect Astrophysics quality,
but neither did I expect anything this bad. It is difficult to
imagine that this is the same company that made my ETX-90.
I did invest a significant amount of time -- couple months
of spare time -- trying to fix everything. Replaced optics,
bearings, fixed wiring, re-built the drives, etc. And there
ultimately was one half-hour session with it where it was a
joy to use. You could slew to an object, and it would put
the object in a 32mm Wide Angle eyepiece, and give a nice view.
And then something else broke in the drive, and I gave up, and
haven't touched it since.
