EQMOD+PHD2 issues?

[Sunshine Man]

Hello all! im here to ask for some advice as im very lost by this point. This all started around 7 months ago, everything was running fine and then i noticed a really large spike, approx 6" then it immedietely went away, thought "ok well that was weird" but the issue was, they did stop, every so often itd spike up again, just for a second, but thats plenty to cause double stars, it did get worse and worse. Even got FLO to service the mount incase it was a mechanical issue. Turns out i replaced my original EQDIR cable (AstroLynx FTDI EQDIR cable 5m) to the same one but a 2 meter version, that massively helped the issues, id get only 3-5 of these spikes over a 3 hour period which was a massive reduction. now to where im at now, i started using my Celestron C8 OTA again with a 0.63 reducer and OAG, and well all the spikes are bad again, using my 6" newt and guidescope non of these issues occur, and i can assure you it is not balance, cable pulling, wind etc, its something to do with EQMOD or PHD2 (it seems EQMOD seems to freeze, report some comm errors such as "CommErr:MSR=144" and "CommErr:MSD=128" with 2 random errors above that" then PHD2 will show the guidestar has moved a huge amount (ive had to turn the star searching distance up alot) and then correct it very quickly, but again with how often they are happening they ruin alot of sub exposures. Everything works fine with the 6" newt and guidescope setup, but not the C8 and OAG (everything used to work fine with the c8 and OAG though, 8 months ago and before), my mount is a Skywatcher HEQ 5 pro

Heres a list of things ive tried/checked
ASCOM drivers
EQMOD settings
PHD2 settings
Cables
Power
Mechanical issues
Windows updates
Different laptop (with windows 10 and not 11)

Heres the PHD2 guide log and debug log
Im sure i pressed save for EQMOD logs but apparently not

[Sunshine Man]

[Sunshine Man]

Apparently Debug file is too large some ive put it in a google drive folder here

[bw_m...@earthlink.net]

Please just follow the instructions and post both your guide and debug log files to our server.

 

https://openphdguiding.org/getting-help/

 

Regards,

Bruce

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[Sunshine Man]

Thank you, but this is where i got told to go? id imagine based off what i read on the link you sent itd just put the guidelog etc here anyway? if you meant going through the PHD2 troubleshooting ive been through that several times, but if i cant get help here its ok, ill figure something out (:
Thank you
Sonny.

[Brian Valente]

you need to use PHD's built in log uploader, then post the url to the zipped logs

Please refer to the page for details

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/c71fe6c7-bc92-41ed-b004-447207995aacn%40googlegroups.com.

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Brian 

Brian Valente

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[bw_m...@earthlink.net]

If you follow the instructions, it will upload the log files to our server where we can conveniently access them.  There will be no limitations to storage space and the UI will help to insure that you’re choosing the correct, matching log files.  It isn’t difficult.  If you take a look at most of the forum posts, you’ll see that’s how it’s done.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/c71fe6c7-bc92-41ed-b004-447207995aacn%40googlegroups.com.

[Sunshine Man]

I see. My apologies, here you go.

[Bruce Waddington]

Ok, here's a look at the tracking errors in your 3 hour guiding session - RA in red, Dec in green, SNR in white:

What you didn't tell us was that you were constantly getting PHD2 alert messages announcing that the ASCOM pulse guide commands had failed,  plus you've said you got some kind of EQMOD comm-related error messages that were correlated with the excursions.  Since you're using EQMOD, which has a long history of doing things correctly with pulse-guiding, and since you apparently have a history with communication problems, it seems to me that you haven't really solved them yet.  In the case of EQMOD, the driver actually issues separate start/stop commands to pulse-guide, so a failure to reliably communicate the 'stop' could certainly cause these large excursions.  In order to get consistently good results, you should be seeing zero communication failures with the mount.  If you look in the EQMOD log files, you should be able to get more detail - but there should be zero communication-related errors.

Regards,

Bruce

[Sunshine Man]

Right yes, sorry i completely forgot to mention those. Thing is, that is entirely new, usually the spikes happen but PHD2 only reports large spikes, not pulseguide failures. when using the 6" newt and guidescope setup, there is no pulseguide failures, yet theres the large spikes (not nearly as frequent as this though) ive been trying to solve the comm issues in EQMOD for ages now, been in the EQMOD forums and they have said theyve covered almost all bases and said to ask here. But i believe you`re 100% correct, when those comm issues are fixed i believe itll work flawlessly again. I thought i saved the EQMOD logs but apparently i havent, ive got alot of screenshots of the errors though. Either way thank you for taking the time to reply and help me out, if you have any suggestions on what/how to fix these comm errors itd be greatly appreciated
Thanks
Sonny

[Brian Valente]

>> if you have any suggestions on what/how to fix these comm errors itd be greatly appreciated

Often comm errors are due to bad cable/connection. you may want to try cleaning the cable connectors, trying different port(s), replacing cable

EQMod and/or your mount vendor will be better able to help you on this 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/open-phd-guiding/eabd3395-fe31-436e-a586-33bede9ad19cn%40googlegroups.com.