A couple of things you may wish to consider.
Weather -- Hail, wind, and snow (depending on where you are) can be part of the concern. I like your chain-gang version in that it could be conceivably rotated upside down to the protect the cells (or in my case reflectors) For serious protection they could flip right over, face down tight to the ground for the night, or bad weather.
Additional utility -- If you are putting in a serious frame that can hold a wind load, you may be able to use these as small sheds, carports, firewood storage/drying racks, dunno -- what else?
(Self) servicing -- The trough racks I am considering, I want to build to be self loading and unloading from a pick-up truck, utility cart, or trailer. But I have not thought that through, yet.
Venetian-blind trackers make more sense for a trough solar collector than they do for a photovoltaic panel.
A trough needs to track, and can do it by just rotating the mirror and leaving the pipe in one place.
A trough that is partially shadowed will just drop its output in proportion. A photovoltaic panel will have some cells shaded and not others. This will drastically reduce output voltage (unless it has the cells wired strictly series up the long direction and parallel in the short direction - which I have NEVER seen).[ Parent ]
With panels mounted close together (which you do to avoid massive lever arms on your structure tearing it up from wind load) you need to rotate the set of panels as a unit to collect more sun than if you just left them pointed in the good-at-noon direction.[ Parent ]
