Mesu & Sitech problems, mainly sitech

[muletopia]

Hello Folks,

After a very long wait my Mesu mount 200 has arrived. I set up Sitech following Lucas Mesu's instructions and could then slew with the hand pad at the
three rates.
I connected to my laptop and started CDC, successful connection to the mount, started up PHD2 , could connect all.
I closed these programs.

Now the hand pad does not change the speed of slewing and a recorded voice from Sitech announces "guide two" when the hand pad change speed button is pressed.

How do I reset the system so that the hand pad can set all speeds?


After last night's lack of progress this morning I found that Sitechexe had somehow hidden my desktop, on start up the message

system32\config\systemprofile\Favou rites\Desktop refers to a location that is unavailable.
(this  on win7 pro 64 bit)
The desktop shows only computer and recycle bin.

However the start button allows access to all the programs that were on my desktop (and others).

The laptop is dual boot, so restarted in Ubuntu and went to the web an checked a few things. The restarted Windows and the desktop was now OK.

After poking around it the problem only occurs when sitech is invoked.

What have I done, and how do I rectify this?

Chris

[ollypenrice]

There is a startup guide by Steve Richards which has a devout following. It comes up in this thread: 

Olly

[muletopia]

Thank you Olly,

Lucas points you to Steve Richard's guide in his instructions, which I followed carefully. Anyway after much frustration the problem was found to be a defective Sitech hand pad. Lucas has been very understanding and helpful and passed on the finding and the fix to  Dan Gray. A quite technical temporary fix, a square inch of paper over the rubber pressure pad. Now when the clouds and smoke permit I can start polar alignment.

I am waiting to see what Sitech suggests.

Chris

[tony210]

Hi - I had a broken hand set and the Sitech unit caused problems which in the end Lucas replaced- so sorted and hopefully all your problems are hardware also- Tony

[muletopia]

Progress has been made.  The only concern is that the piece of paper remains in my hand pad. I must ask how Lucas tolerates ill conceived questions from new owners. I had problems drift aligning and bothered Lucas with my problem. Lucas diligently corresponded with suggestions. To the surprise of neither of us it was a user problem, I had to send this message to Lucas.

Quote

As far as I can see your mount is performing flawlessly. As you probably suspected user error. Perhaps a little explanation might help.
I first installed a Syntra mount on my permanent pier about four years ago,did  Syntra's 3 point alignment and polar alignment followed by DARV drift alignment.
Then every couple of months I corrected for pier movement by further drift alignment and gave the matter no further thought. I did not realize how far the pier had moved
over this period.  So when I tried DARV with your mount the return trace of the azimuth drift was not in the picture. Slowly this problem dawned on me So I just watched the
elongation of the initial point and corrected that until the return trip was visible. Last night the three drifts adjusting with your excellent east/west adjusters had no  displacement
visible after 2 minutes, similarly for altitude, tonight I will extend this and check it with PHD.

(If your geology is OK, the pier sits on the geologically ancient Yilgarn block here in Western Australia, so clay soil up to 10 metres thick. So pier movement is always going to happen.)

End quote

So I join the happy band of Mesu mount 200 owners, for the excellence of the mount and the prompt, kind support from Lucas.

 

Chris
 

[muletopia]

Well,Another month of fine weather has passed with the mount & Sitech used every night. The Mesu mount is a dream,just turn it on and worry about other things.

The paper has been removed from the hand pad at Lucas' suggestion and it has given no further problems.There seems

be no explanation of its initial malfunction.

Further Darve drift alignment was performed until there was no perceptible drift on either axis after 20 minutes.

This allowed a series of six and a half minute exposures with round stars with 2415 mm focal length using off axis guiding.

I built a 26 star sky map in Sitech and pointing  is excellent, target object to image centred. At the suggestion of another Sitech user here I did not turn my controller off for several weeks, no problem until a few days ago. Then the pointing was still good but the image jumped around by a few arc minutes. After some initial panic I recalled the advice of the Hitch Hikers guide and ceased to panic. I recalled the problems reported on this forum by Zakalwe about the mount behaving like this. So I turned the controller off for short time,"lost communication with Sitch" the lady informed me. True, so I just turned the controller on again did an offset init, reloaded my sky map and all was well again.

I find the Sitech software nice and intuitive to use and this is the first software problem I have encountered.

I understood from Zakalwe's long series of posts in this forum about this style of problem that it had been resolved by Dan Gray.

It seems that there is a lingering issue. The mount has never lost power, it is supplied from two 70 amp hour batteries kept charged by a 100 watt solar panel , no mains power at the observatory.

Moral   "Don't Panic"

Chris