Cable extension

[robindurant]

I want to use a extended cable, approx 5m to run my QHY5 CCD Guiding Camera. I bought a cable from Maplins, special low loss i think, which works OK on my Atik CCD but the QHY5 Camera will not pick up, only on the supplied shorter one works. Is there a booster I can fit in line.

Robin

[beamish]

Have you tried one of the Active USB cables yet Robin ? (5m), or perhaps a to a powered hub and from there an active cable ?

Although the 1st should work.

Karlo

[robindurant]

Its an active one I bought from Maplins.

Robin

[beamish]

Umm, I'll have a go in the morning Robin with mine and the hub idea and let you know, would that be okay ? I'm just off to my bed

[robindurant]

Many thanks

[blinky]

The way that I have things setup is as follows:

I have a powered USB hub on the pier into which I plug the Orion CCD, DSI and 2 X USB>serial converters. I then have an active USB cable (5m) to connect to the laptop. I used to run into loads of problems before I got the active cable/powered USB hub. One thing I still have to do is make sure the USB has power before connecting to the laptop as doing things the other way round the laptop wont pick up the camera!

[Beyond_Vision]

An active cable will only improve the data signal. The 5v USB supply is just passed straight through and over a longer length of cable if the camera is drawing near to the maximum 500mA allowed the voltage may drop enough to cause the camera to malfunction.

Therefore use the active cable first then the powered hub and then a standard short USB cable to the CCD.

Regards

Kevin

[George]

Mine works fine via a powered hub.

[beamish]

Okay Robin, well I've just tried the Q5 thru just an active USB 5m and it was fine-I just found that the wizard asked to re-install the Q5 driver and the QGvideo cmos driver. Perfectly normal. I then tried again thru a powered hub ( I already knew this works cos that's how I have it), then lastly, attached to the pw'd hub which in turn was attached via the 5m Active USB- again I was asked to re-install the drivers and when completed I was able to connect to both QGvideo and PHD.

HTH

Karlo

Just to clarify- cam=pwd hub=active USB=lappy

[robindurant]

Hi Guys

Thanks for your help. It is now sorted. As you say it seems that if you change the cable or add a Hub you have to re install the QHY5.

I reverted to just my active 5m cable, no Hub, re installed the QYH5 and it works fine.

Strange that I did not have to do this with my Atik when I extended the cable with a 5m active.

Thanks again

Robin

[Milamber]

Back in the old days, there were many USB compatibility issues with these cameras and so Steve had plenty of experience in making sure the cameras had little or no chance for such issues to become a problem. You will find that, because of that research and time spent faffing about, only very rarely will Artemis or Atik cameras have such problems and even on the odd occasion one comes up, usually a fix is already available.

Arthur - nuffin to do with Atik but just saying is all.

[Ant]

Why would you have re-install the QHY5 drives just because you add a cable...? Would you have to do that everytime you connec all the hardware together?

Last thing you want to do when setting up is start re-installing software