I just wanted to publicly thank Alan Sickling, who lives in the UK, for his patient and careful advice to me that enabled me to fix an intermittent runaway problem in RA that became a permanent runaway problem.

I've been "off the air" for about 5 weeks dealing with this problem. I'd be running a plan without monitoring it, and when I'd come out to the observatory in the morning, I'd find the telescope totally lost and pointed below the horizon in the west. This kind of spastic motion of the Meade drive has been dubbed runaway, and it can occur in either RA or Dec. My intermittent runaway recently became permanent, so that when I'd turn on the telescope, it would start running away immediately. That would put you out of business in a hurry!

I contacted Alan, who is a regular on the LX200 forum. He has great respect from those he's helped, as you can read on that forum, and I can add my name to the list. Thanks to his experience helping others, I'm back in operation tonight with a telescope that's tuned up a bit better than it was before this problem appeared.

Thanks, Alan. I very much appreciated your help.