Skywatcher GPS Dongle

[Tinker1947]

I am thinking about buying one, does anybody use one any pitfalls to be wary off, are they worth the money, is there a cheaper substitute...any thing i haven't asked about that might be relevant, Thanks in advance......

[Ben Ritchie]

I have one on my EQ6, works fine - not really much more than an accurate clock though unless you move around a lot, so not sure it's really worth the cost.

My unit seems to be a generic, not skywatcher branded

edit: just to add that I think that EQMOD supports any GPS device that outputs NMEA format, so if you're in the EQMOD camp already that would be much cheaper than the SkyWatcher option. Quick ebay search suggests under £30 or so.

[perfrej]

I would guess that any simple GPS with a serial port will do. After all, they're all NMEA 0183 at 4800 bps - nothing to it

One note is that when you get into serious precision pinting and modeling, the time given off by a standard GPS is not good enough. It takes a third of a second for the data to be sent to the scope and then some time for the scope to process it, and to top it off, the GPS doesn't send you milliseconds. In the end, you will be off by at least 15 arcseconds, which is no good with a high precision mount. But, that is most often a total over-kill

/p

[Tinker1947]

I bid on a GPS on E-Bay....got it for £15 including Postage, that will do i hope,,,Thanks for the replies......

[Stu_2011]

Hi

I have one and they work well. Good but expensive.

In terms of using other GPS dongles they do seem to work but I think it depends on the software version of the handset. I read somewhere on cloudynights that one of the recent handset upgrades from Skywatcher limited the GPS dongle to just the Skywatcher one and not the generic ones. Seemed to upset a lot of people.

I'm sure a google search will the thread.

Thanks

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Tinker1947]

Well my ND-100s arrived, downloaded new drivers and i now know where i live, it also works with Autoroute 2006, more cables exclaimed the wife.....ordered a EQDIR Adapter clouds or no clouds something to play with...