Mesu 200 issue??

[Astroscot2]

You know Ray, that's a good point,  what I may do is send it off to SX and ask them to give it the once over, First I will give pulse guiding a turn the next clear night when ever that will be?

 

Mark

[Zakalwe]

Personally, I wouldn't bother with ST4 guiding. It's just one more cable and one more problem to diagnose.

If SiTech can connect to and control the mount then it's unlikely to be a USB or connection problem.

I have no experience of AstroArt, so I can't really comment.  I use PHD2 and when I was diagnosing my own problems I found the Guiding Assistant to be invaluable. This disables the guiding outputs that are normally sent to the mount and at the same time it monitors the guiding corrections that it would normally send. Does AA have something similar?

PHD also allows you to issue guide commands manually. Again, this is invaluable when diagnosing problems as you can command the mount to slew N,S,E,W with manually issued guide commands. if the mount responds then you know that the guide commands are getting to the mount AND the mount is reacting correctly to them. Any guiding problems are then narrowed down to configuration or problems upstream of the guiding software.

Given that 99% of problems tend to be related to the last thing that you touched then I would be looking at the camera with some suspicion. Junking the ST4 guiding would remove a faulty ST4 port in the camera or a dodgy ST4 cable from the equation.

[Zakalwe]

On 28/11/2018 at 10:12, RayD said:

  I note you are running V9.5 firmware, and often with that you could get a message pop up showing the RA and Dec rates vary by an unexpected amount if using PHD2,

..., it was fixed in V9.6, so if this is your issue you may want to update the firmware.

Aha! You've solved a problem that I was having. PHD was popping that error up after calibration. I normally ignore it and it seems not to cause a problem.

I've upgraded to V9.6, so that should sort it.

[Jkulin]

I don't own a Mesu, but from observations running any mount under 12 volts is asking for trouble, Billy kindly offered to lend you a replacement PSU which I would grab with both hands as I am fairly sure you will find that this will solve 80% of peoples mount problems.

I would also as others have suggested move away from ST4 and use Pulse guiding instead as I find it so much more reliable.

[RayD]

1 hour ago, Zakalwe said:

Aha! You've solved a problem that I was having. PHD was popping that error up after calibration. I normally ignore it and it seems not to cause a problem.

I've upgraded to V9.6, so that should sort it.

Yes it never affected guiding at all, and this was always spot on.  However, for no reason whatsoever it bugged me and finally got resolved.  I suspect they've just turned the message off ?  

[Zakalwe]

1 minute ago, RayD said:

 However, for no reason whatsoever it bugged me and finally got resolved.

Me too. I seem to spend more time tracking bugs down and fixing them than I actually do using the damn thing for it's intended purpose! Perversely, I sort of enjoy it!

[RayD]

2 hours ago, Astroscot2 said:

You know Ray, that's a good point,  what I may do is send it off to SX and ask them to give it the once over, First I will give pulse guiding a turn the next clear night when ever that will be?

 

Mark

Pulse guiding is certainly my preferred route, Mark, but this isn't saying ST4 guiding is wrong or in any way worse.  It does mean one less cable, which is nice.  

[RayD]

17 minutes ago, Zakalwe said:

Perversely, I sort of enjoy it!

I am so glad it isn't just me!!!! 

Naturally I prefer avoiding issues, but love tracking them down a zapping them when they arise ?

[steppenwolf]

ST4 control is OK in most scenarios but I can't think of any reason why anyone would prefer to use it over pulse guiding which is, of course. supported in this mount. I can't add anything to the PHD2 discussion as I still run XP in my observatory and PHD2 doesn't support XP - or is it the other way round ?

I'd still like to know that I had a working ST4 connection for completeness but, that's just me! ?

[Zakalwe]

14 hours ago, steppenwolf said:

I'd still like to know that I had a working ST4 connection for completeness but, that's just me! ?

I'd be a heck of a lot more productive if I didn't spend hours/days/months trying to get specific things to work even when I don't have use for that function! It makes my teeth itch if I know that a bit of kit is advertised to do a particular function and doesn't even if I have no utility for that function!

[Astroscot2]

15 hours ago, RayD said:

Pulse guiding is certainly my preferred route, Mark, but this isn't saying ST4 guiding is wrong or in any way worse.  It does mean one less cable, which is nice.  

My guiding has always been via the ST4 cable,  I tend to stick with what works and works well rather than making changes to my set up.  Ive been wanting to move over to SGP for a while purely for the centre frame function as this feature just does not work well on AstroArt.  There are too few clear nights to dabble with kit but that's all I seem to do these days.. so unproductive.

[Astroscot2]

Just as a quick follow up,  Ive only had a few opportunities to work on the guiding issue with the weather being as bad as its been.  Last night we had hazy skies which allowed me to do some further tests but no real imaging.   I'm still unable to make any guiding corrections via the ST4 cable and AA5,  I was able to guide with good round stars with PHD via Ascom and good guiding was also achieved with AA5 and Ascom.  At some point I will try guiding with ST4 and PHD just to help pinpoint where the initial issue occurred but I'm glad to be in a position now to do some imaging.

Also thanks to David, aka Skipper Billy for dropping off and loaning me his PSU, to rule power issues.

 

Mark