Best solution for sending guide pulses?

[Thommy]

Dear all,

Until now I've used a cable from my laptop to the Skywatcher handset to make use of pulse guiding. For this I make use of a USB to serial connector. Until now this worked fine with my old CGEM and also with my current EQ8. But now I experience frequent loss of communication. When this happens, my laptop report that the USB to serial connector is connected and working, but ASCOM notifies me that connection is lost. Strange that something that used to work fine suddenly fails. No changes has been made to the laptop.

What are you using for sending guide pulses? ST4 cable? Or a USB to serial adaptor that actually works?

Thanks,

Thommy

[kirkster501]

Tommy, On my NEQ6 I use the same USB>Serial that I uses to control the mount.  Can you still perform slews etc from your planetarium software when ASCOM reports this error?

Have any updates occurred to Windows?  There was discussion about a recent update that caused ASCOM errors.

 

 

[kens]

On my EQ6 Pro I use an EQDIR cable and bypass the hand control

[Marci]

Power management could be putting the USB port into standby... (it shouldn’t, but it could be - in some cases it’ll depend on your particular power management profile) ...worth checking via destructions at https://www.top-password.com/blog/set-windows-to-power-on-off-usb-devices-in-sleep-mode/ just to rule it out.

[kirkster501]

1 hour ago, kens said:

On my EQ6 Pro I use an EQDIR cable and bypass the hand control

+1

[Thommy]

Thanks for your replies!

@Kirkster501: My laptop is stand-alone, so I've disabled windows updates. No, I didn't try to slew from CDC - will try that next time.

@Ken: I will definitely consider the EQDIR option.

@Marci: That definitely needs to be checked.

Anyone who use a wireless adapter?

Thommy

[Marci]

Wireless adapters bring an inherent risk of instability due to other conditions out of your control vs wired. My rig performs fine over wifi (serial over TCP), but drops over Bluetooth. A friend's also has Bluetooth related oddities going on. My Lynx EQDIR cable however has never missed a beat (that said, nor has my USB > Serial > Handset cable).