These new trackers are improved over the old ones I believe. They now use only two LEDs and they're the biggest LEDs I've ever seen. My only experience so far is with my 2x80 watt array at my garage with the same unit. It has a very small satellite actuator on it and it has been pointing at the sun every time I looked at it for months now. Duane's website is seriously outdated. The new trackers have the night-parking feature and are significantly different from those he was offering a few years ago.

I'm sorry you had those problems with Duane. I might be reluctant to deal with him as well if I had that experience. However, when I looked at this tracker and realized that I wouldn't have even been able to solder the components into the board in two hours, much less design, test and improve the circuit, not to mention manufacturing the circuit board, I realized that if they work, they're worth 3x what he's selling them for.

My pole is only 3" and only 3' deep. It has about a 16" cardboard tube filled with concrete around the pole. It's scary-loose in the ground, though the clay soil helps a little. We had some 20mph gusts come up tonight when the thing was parked and I could see a 1/4" gap where it had moved the pole in the wet earth. I don't exactly know what you mean by "rigid on the pole" There's very little slop in my moving mechanism, due to the worm gear design. My other array was just thrown together with no attention to slop and Its been fine. I can wobble the whole pole/array by grabbing the edge of a panel but there's no dead spot, if that's what you mean. Are you using an actualle satellite dish mount? Those things have to track pretty accurately to get a strong signal and they're generally designed for no slop.

All that being said, I realized this evening that this new tracker is not working properly yet. I noticed when I did my manual run from east to west that it takes a lot more current for the motor to pull the thing up from its limits. Well, I went out this evening and I could hear the motor being energized but it wouldn't move the chain on the gear drive. The array was pretty far east with the sun in the west. If I helped it along, it would run and move though. The circuit in these trackers only energizes the motor for a second or two every couple minutes to keep from overheating the components, I believe (maybe to keep from cooking your jack as well?). I cut up an old droplight cord for my cable runs and it was pretty thin wire, maybe 20-22 ga. In addition, the motor on this worm drive unit is significantly larger than on the satellite linear actuators I've seen. I'm seriously hoping I have a problem with wire size and not enough current at the motor and that the tracker is not the weak link here. I'll be going out tomorrow with some significantly larger wire and rewiring it to see if that solves my problem.

I'll post back when I know more.

Volvo Farmer