Meade LX10 8"

3.0 Meade LX10 8"

- Top notch optics
- Much cheaper than LX90/LX200
- Simple to use
- Portable yet powerful

- Poor mechanical design/construction
- Drive controller bug
- Can be cheaply fixed

I recently purchased this scope used. It is the upgraded model with the UHTC optics and 8x50 finder. It has a standard Meade field tripod, and a DC drive (not quartz clock). There doesn't seem to be a lot of them out there for sale used, which suggests something about them I think; people like them. I chose the 8" SCT because I wanted something reasonably portable but with enough light gathering to do some real deep sky observing. I also (for now) wanted to avoid a go-to scope as I wanted to learn and appreciate finding things the old fashioned way...makes finding objects in the sky that much more exciting!

My first impression of the scope when it arrived was that it was a very well built, quality instrument. Everything seems to be sturdy and well built. The forks and drive system are solid, and the scope itself was clean, and well finished off. Even after traveling by UPS for several thousand kilometers to get to me, the collimation was pretty good. From what I understand, the optics of this scope are exactly the same as in the LX90 and LX200 which are far more expensive. The first night I brought it home I immediately set it up in the backyard and pointed it at Jupiter...what a sight! After using it for a couple more evenings however, I began to notice some shortcomings of this particular scope.

Tripod:
- Feet are not adjustable for leveling
- Instead of a spreader to steady the legs, there are stop blocks. On my scope one of the blocks sits high and hits the wedge, making it sit crooked.
- Legs are hollow steel tubing, and without the spreader they seem a little springy
- The legs are not through bolted to the tripod base, instead they have threaded holes on the aluminum base side that the legs are held onto with funky bolts. The tabs on the legs are wider apart than those on the base, making for a poor fit-up.

Wedge:
- Hex keys needed to adjust elevation (latitude), and the fine tuning mechanism is flimsy.
- No fine tuning feature for azimuth.
- Angle scale on side of wedge is a sticker that was off by at least a full degree on my wedge.

OTA:
- Standard Meade 90deg prism kind of cheap.
- Drive works but has some bugs that are well documented on user sites: need to replace a capacitor on the controller board to give good hand controller function, scope slows down in colder weather but can be tuned up using the potentiometer that is on the controller board.
- My scope had a huge focuser backlash; when you change direction from focusing in to focusing out it takes a full turn before the mirror starts to move.
- Associated with the focuser backlash is mirror flop, which I understand is not uncommon with SCT's. As you're focusing, the mirror moves around a little bit on its track, causing the image in the eyepiece to dance around by about a 1/4 of the field of view.

From my research online, all of these problems are minor and with a reasonable level of handiness can be fixed up with little cost. They are essentially all mechanical design problems, and stem from those components coming from China, presumably so Meade could save money. The optics are made in the US (I believe), and they are excellent.