Obs30 I did not consider the AM5 because of its weight limitation and some minor mechanical features that I like better in the NYX design and interfaces.
I have been running two RST-135, one of them was from RainbowAstro's very first manufacturing run. In the past few months, I had been looking to see if RainbowAstro would release something that is in between the RST-135 and RST-300 weight class to add to my stable. And even better, if it also has a good optical encoder to make auto-guiding a bit more relaxed. The RST-135 is perfectly fine if you keep the payload under 20 lbs or so, while the RST-300 is a way overkill for my needs.
It looks like the NYX101 (albeit without the precision optical encoder) might meet that criterion for me. As you mentioned, the non-moving connectors are a hugh plus; I have Gaffer tape all over my RST-135 to strain relieve the connectors :-).
I would not touch an AM5 after seeing what the time-derivative of the periodic error curve looks like -- there are parts of some of their published curves where 0.25 second guide exposures would be needed to freeze a guide star to get sufficiently accurate estimate of its centroid for my tastes.
I am looking forward to see periodic error curves on the NYX-101. If it is similar to the Harmonic gears on the RST-135, I may go for it to get the extra payload capability. Since Pegasus advertises it as "Harmonic" (a trademark) and not as a generic strain wave gear drive (which you have to do if the strain wave gear is not manufactured by Harmonic Drive Group (with engineering done in USA, Germany and Japan), there is hope. As long as Pegasus can precision machine parts as well as a company that machines robotic arms for a living.
The other is how repeatable is the altitude and azimuth adjustments. The RST-135 had to go through an iteration of mechanical update before they got that mostly (not completely) right. And I notice from the images that, like the RST-135, the Pegasus too includes a hex slot in the azimuth knobs. It is from details like this that you get the assurance that the designer actually uses telescopes and mounts themselves. Who cares how good a tripod mounted mount is, if it takes you forever to get it polar aligned (so far, Avalon appears to be the only company to include motorized polar alignment).
One thing that did bother me is the NYX uses stepper motors instead of servo motors. However, they do claim a resolution of 0.1 arcsecond, so that should let us do 0.25" type RA axis guiding. I suspect the declination axis may have less resolution, since they didn't brag about it. Anyway, something that I will be monitoring.
It does not bother me if the ASIAIR does not support the NYX-101, since I will not be using the ASIAIR if that is the case. I don't let the tail wag the dog.
Chen
