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"I was lucky enough to have been a beta-tester for the cordless hand controller and was able to test it for two months of observing in varying conditions in the Pacific Northwest. I've had the standard hand controller for a little over two years and found I was using it less and less because I didn't want to mess with the cord. As soon as I tried the cordless version I was hooked. I could control the most minute movement of the scope while holding the key-chain sized cordless hand controller in my pocket. I particularly like the center button function that enables each direction button to be toggled to either a fast slew or a slow slew. This beats having to press two buttons to get a fast slew as on the original hand controller. This translated to using the cordless hand controller for most of my observations - essentially any time I had the magnification over 200x on my 20" f/5 I used the unit. The higher the magnification the most useful it became. The most extreme example of this was on one exceptionally steady night at Steens Mountain, Oregon when I was able to use 1250x on the Ring Nebula. The Ring nearly filled the field of view at this magnification and the cordless hand controller not only made centering the nebula a snap, but it was also great fun to sweep along the perimeter of the nebula to soak in the subtle details. Galaxy clusters were just as much fun - slewing from one galaxy to the next while keeping my hands in my pockets was a blast. Two other nice features was not having to worry about stepping on the long cord of the original controller (done that a couple of times) and not having to wind up and put away the cord when breaking down the scope for the night. I only unplugged the power to the receiver, put the controller in my observing vest pocket and they were ready to go for the next observing session. To say I'm sold is an understatement." Howard Banich |