Skywatcher GTi + SkySafari Pro

[williamnohair]

Hi

am posting this in case it helps anyone who has suffered the same problem as myself.

In a nutshell: Own a Skywatcher Gti mount for some time now and used with some success, also purchased some time ago Skysafari and wanted to use both, with a problem much reported on the web and so much information out there that it can get a bit confusing and certainly in my case frustrating, after all just want stuff to work!

After much experimenting and help from other postings this is what happens when you fire up the Gti.

The mount generates its own wireless network and becomes the gateway, its IP address is always 192.168.4.1 you see this when making a connection with the Synscan app/program, its very similar to a normal router that serves you the Internet. Any device that then connects to this network then gets an assigned address one up from this, i.e. 192.168.4.2, .3, etc. However if you run the Safari app and go in to settings you will find it has also been allocated an address which is one up from the device you are using. In my case my Ipad was connected to the wireless network and had been given the address of  192.168.4.3.  but when I checked the IP address in the settings page of SkySafari it was 192.168.4.4 !

If you accept this you get the error that the app cannot join the wireless network check your settings etc. If you now manually change that address to the same as the device running the Synscan app in my case .2 it should connect and work. However there is a caveat to this, I tried using an Iphone  4 and an old Ipad and they would not work together no matter what. I got the other error message that I had joined the network but the mount did not recognise the device type I had selected (Skywatcher Synscan Alt Az GoTo) and no amount of changing things would solve it. To get around this I used my trusty Win 7 laptop to run the Synscan program and things worked perfectly so it can be done don't give up!

Sorry this is so long but I hope it helps someone out there. So to round off when you fire up the mount it becomes address no 1, any physical device gets the next address 2, any software running on the that device gets the next address 3. When you fire up SkySafari it must have the same address as the one that the SynScan app has got and this can e changed in SkySafari settings. None of this makes any sense to me as I thought software couldn't act in that way but there you are. I hope I have got this right feel free to contact me if things don't work

 

Regards

 

Bill