My Losmandy G11 arrived in August 2006, and I started keeping notes on my experiences with it pretty much from the moment that it arrived (these have now grown rather lengthy - part one, part two, part three, part four and part five). I've had a fair few people asking questions, so it's worth explaining what these notes are. And aren't.

I started keeping notes for my benefit - if I don't write stuff down, I forget it. After a while it occurred to me that they might be useful for other people too. In essence they're a record of how I - as someone with no real understanding of German Equatorial mounts, little mechanical ability and not much free time - have found life with a Losmandy G11, with its problems, confusions, disasters, fixes and triumphs. It isn't a critique of the G11 or a guide on how to use it, although it contains elements of both.

I got the G11 thinking it would be my first, and last, big mount purchase. That was rather naive. For visual use it's near perfect, but imaging has been an education and it's taken a year to start to see the mount at its best. I was aware when I ordered the mount that the G11 benefited from some time spent tuning the mount, but I had assumed that this was only required when imaging at high resolutions and low-resolution widefield imaging would be straightforward. That wasn't really correct. I've put in a lot of time analyzing, adjusting and testing the mount, and it's paid off; the mount's periodic error has improved greatly, dropping from an 'out of the box' 16 arcseconds peak-to-peak to under six. Autoguided imaging is no longer a battle, and good medium/high-resolution imaging performance is now routine with my Astro-Physics 130EDT. The mount is performing very well indeed - but getting there required a lot more work and took a lot longer than I ever imagined.

Would I do it again? I've had something of a love-hate relationship with the mount and, a few months ago, I'd have said 'hmm, probably not'. But even then pausing to think about the alternatives would have changed my mind. A mount that carries as much as the G11 and works flawlessly, like a Takahashi NJP or Astro-Physics 900, is much more expensive. The Takahashi EM-200 or Astro-Physics Mach1 perform better than the G11 but cost more and carry less. And Celestron's CGE has its own individual problems; it's not obviously better or worse than the G11, just different (and, in the UK, more expensive - with a trip back to the factory if anything goes wrong). Now that I've started to really get to grips with the mount the answer would be an undoubted 'yes'. Once you get past the initial learning curve the Gemini system is very powerful, while the G11 is solid, well built, easy to tune and, when the work is done, performs impressively. For the money there's nothing to beat it.