Does anyone know what the 'LE Read Delay' should be in PHD for a spc900nc?

[Reggie]

Hi All, is anyone using a long exposure modded philips spc900nc with PHD autoguiding software? If so can you tell me what 'LE Read Delay' setting you are using? I'm using a philips spc900nc with the LE mod with a serial connection into a usb to serial adapter on windows XP.

[Parallax]

IIRC mine is set to 48ms.

However, it isn't 100% reliable - loads of 'black' frames. It maybe because I'm running Vista but I have yet to get to the bottom of the problem.

HTH

Steve

[Reggie]

Thanks Steve, that gives me some room to play with the delay rate, 10-20ms is the average but as none of these gave me any joy I thought I'd ask first before I go rattling up to 100ms as its a bit clunky to set it and test.

48ms doesn't do anything for me, I get the first exposure looks like its grabbed 1 field (1/2 a frame alternate lines) w/ matrix style lines going down the screen, then every exposure after that is as if its taking a 5fps frame.

[Reggie]

Still no joy from 0-50ms it doesn't go any higher than that.

[Parallax]

Have you tried it with K3CCDTools? That goes much higher. You have to have version 3 though. You can download the 30 day trial which, contrary to popular belief, does work with USB>serial LE.

Steve

[Reggie]

I used the trial a while back, only used it a couple of times and it won't let me re-trial unforunately.

[Parallax]

GuideDog? I can't remember what settings are available though.

Steve

[Reggie]

I do have guidedog on the machine but in the end I went with PHD and got it all working very nicely without the long exposure for now. I managed a 350second guided exposure with nice round stars I am a very happy and tired bunny this afternoon, Wahay.

My aim has been to get my nexstar 6SE ota and mount up and running as an autoguiding system using my WO 66 SD apo as my imager and the 6SE ota as the guider. The mount on its own even with good eq alignment was prone to wandering backwards and forwards across the target, not a huge amount of movement but enough to ruin 70% of my images when not guiding looks like the only thing that will mess up my imaging now is user error/planes/satellites.