Televue 5X Powermate

Anybody have any experience with this eyepiece/barlow/image amplifier from Televue? What do you think about it?

Optically, I'd say that the 5X Powermate is excellent. It works well with f/5 and faster scopes; otherwise its too much power. I use it with my f/5 Genesis; it produces less than a .8mm exit pupil even with a 40mm eyepiece in my C14 which is too small. A 5mm eyepiece gives a .5mm exit pupil in an f/10 SCT, so you really never need it with an SCT or other long focal ratio instrument.

A friend of mine, Ron "DewBuster" Keating, used it recently on a very steady nite on half of epsilon Lyra with his 7mm Pentax XL in his outstanding C11 to give a "stupid hi power" of 2000x. Textbook airy disks with a single, very round diffraction ring around each component. We then added a 2x Ultima to give 4000x. Images were still round and covered most of the FOV. There was a lot of glare in the FOV.

By the way, it was really outstanding with the 7mm Pentax without any barlows at 400x, just a lot smaller. Clear skies!