My iOptron AltAz Goto Mount Arrived Today

But the box was not in very good shape. When I went to my porch to get the box, I noticed that it wasn’t taped very securely and when I picked it up, stuff almost fell out of the box.

I was worried something would have fallen out during shipping because I couldn’t find the power supply. Everything else seemed to be there.

Eerily, at the time I was opening my new toy (or rather, I was catching the pieces of my new toy) I got an email from iOptron.com titled “Packaging Issues With Your Order”.

Here’s what it said:

First I want to thank you for your recent order of SmartStar-E GO TO Mount at iOptron Online Store. We appreciate your business and your feedback to help us improve as we launch this product line and several future product lines.

Regrettably I have to inform you that the shipment sent to you last week has several major packaging issues due to a miscommunications with our facility in China. Those issues are:

1. The package was not double-boxed as we expected. Several customers have reported breaking of packaging during the process of UPS shipment and therefore missing of some accessories.

2. The Users’ Manual is absent from the package.

3. AC Adaptor is missing from the package.

We are working hard to resolve those issues. The follow steps will be taken for customers who have ordered our products:

1. Missing items from the packages will be replaced and shipped as early as next week. For all future shipments, an additional heavy duty boxes will be used in addition to factory packaging.

2. We are asking customers to download users’ manuals from our website at http://www.ioptron.com/support.aspx?catalog=15. If a customer prefer a printout of the manuals we will send it via mail too.

3. AC Adaptor will be sent to customers separately as early as next week. You can operate the mount with batteries (not included) in the mean time.

Cool. I can deal with that. I understand that they might be working out the kinks on a new product line. I’ll wait from my power supply and use the batteries until it does.

I thought I’d put it through its paces tomorrow during our science “free for all” session. I’ll take pictures then and post them.

So far, my first impressions are good. For $200.00, it seems a lot sturdier than I thought it would be. I’ll know better once I put some weight on it. We’ll probably mount my Coronado PST and check out the Sun.

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