When I bought the TAL 150 PM in 2001, it was my first serious telescope. Originally it came with a heavy-duty motorised equatorial mount on a pier. Apart from being a good telescope by itself, the nice thing about the TAL was the completeness of the whole package. It came with a brilliant 8 X 50 finder, a fair 10mm eyepiece, an excellent  25 mm eyepiece, a barlow, some filters, a removable  eyepiece recticle and a screw-driver!

The original mount  was motorised in R.A., but it lacked provisions for a declination drive and a polar-alignment finder. For visual use, (or astro- photography from a fixed location) that is no problem. I actually liked the original mount  very much, because of it's stability, and because it was equipped with a slip-clutch in R.A., which meant that you could move the telescope, while the R.A. drive was running, without having to release a lever or a screw.

After a while I ran into a used Vixen SP. Mechanically it was in good shape. It had an R.A. motor, but the electronics were broken. I bought a motor for the declination drive as well and I built a new control box, which you can see in the picture, on the tripod-leg to the right. The control box drives the stepper-motors in half-step mode, and the R.A. correction rates are 75% - 133%. For object-positioning a fast-mode (8x) is available. The control-box is operated by a four-button hand-controller (on the left tripod leg in the picture).

The legs of the original Vixen tripod were replaced by wooden legs of a Berlebach tripod.In stead of an eyepiece, the picture shows my CCD camera attached to the telescope.