QHY8 woes

[MartinB]

I've had my QHY8 for 3 or 4 years and used it very little. In large part this is because I have no confidence that it will work when I want it too. I have wasted too much time with blank screens and refusals to connect. It is a shame because when it has worked I have been pleased with the results.

The icing up I can just about come to terms with - keep the optical cover on, keep it pointing upwards, keep it away from damp etc.

I recently imaged M31 and apart from problems with icing (which I hope will be sorted by a voltage reducer thingy from Maplins as recommended by SteveL) it worked ok. However, the following night it just produced a grey image the brightness of which didn't change with exposure. This evening it refused to connect to Maxim. I have cleared out all the drivers and then ran through the original installation routine. This got it connected but without bringing up the QHY8 control window. The offset and gain can still be set under properties but you have to disconnect every time to do that. Worse still, although connected it still produced what appears to be a bias frame regardless of exposure.

I then tried the V2 driver and the latest 64 bit driver which was released last September. The camera wouldn't connect with these. I then cleared these out using the QHY8 install tool and located a driver dated 2008 which Bern once sent me. Installing this did give me the QHY8 control window but no better result with the images, just a slightly different histogram, unaffected by exposure length.

Many times I've felt the camera is caput only to find it is something stupid I've done e.g. having the offset too low, or something that is mended by endles experimenting with different drivers.

Has anyone got any bright ideas, or is it a trip to FLO for an SX M25 or M26.

[Beyond_Vision]

I must admit the software support is pants. The QHY8 site and forum is a nightmare to follow. The best results was using Toms drivers and instructions but this has been taken down so is no longer accessible. The toms ascom driver seemed to work the best which allowed you to change the offset gain etc whilst connected. I had this working fine on my previous laptop but now on my latest mini PC I am using, it doesn't seem to work with Astroart properly and behave slightly different in Maxim

[MartinB]

I've got the ascom one but didn't try that tonight. Will give it a try. Thanks Kevin