I've been considering buying a harmonic drive mount for a while and had considered a number of options but as all my other mounts are of the Sky-Watcher brand and have worked well, I decided to go with one of the new Sky Watcher harmonic drive mounts, in this case the Wave 100i. together with the wave carbon fibre tripod. FLO provided their usual prompt and efficient delivery service and I received the items within forty eight hours of placing my order. The mount head is supplied with a robust carrying case together with a secondary saddle that can be used if you wish to use two camera rigs etc simultaneously on the same mount plus a USB cable and a 12v power cord. On removing the mount head from its carrying case a nut fell out of it. This turned of to be one of the foundation nuts for the alt adjustment locking screws. It was easy enough to replace but this shouldn't really happen. The mount was secured to the tripod and I installed my grab ang go rig consisting of a Red Cat 51, ASI585MC Pro camera, ASIair Mini, ASI mini guider and EAF on the mount. I was surprised how light this was, I could easily lift it with one hand. As with most harmonic drive mounts, there is no provision for a polar scope, so | used the polar alignment function in the ASIair software. the alt and az adjustment knobs are nice and chunky and very smooth to operate making polar alignment pretty straight forward. After polar aligning and adjusting the focus, I slewed the mount to various targets, the mount was very quite and smooth in operation.
When I attempted to calibrate the guiding the calibration failed due to the RA drive not moving. I contacted Alex at FLO about this, and he was very helpful, it turned out the mount required a firmware upgrade. After installing this the guiding worked just fine. One thing I have noticed is that the USB cable supplied with the mount can catch on William Optics dovetail bar I am currently using when the declination drive is in operation due to the orientation of the mount USB socket and the right angled plug on the cable, as it is I use a Lynx Astro EQ-dir ASCOM compatible cable which plugs into the rj45 socket for the Syn Scan hand controller to the mount which doesn't give any problems. I don't often use the Syn Scan App on my phone, but I did test this and it worked fine. So far I have used this mount connected the ASIair mini and also connected to my Laptop running Sharp Cap and Stellarium with the ASCOM platform and it performs well with both. Overall I'm very happy with this mount so far, but have not fully explored all of its capabilities yet. The Tripod is a tad on the low side, an extension tube is desirable in my opinion but these are currently out of stock at FLO, I shall be getting one when available. Counterweights are available if required but as I will not be exceeding the weight were these become necessary, I have no need for these. The user manual is not supplied in hard copy with the mount but is available for download from Sky-Watcher.