No movement in RA

[Vedran Furač]

Hello,

Trying PHD2 (2.6.2) and guiding for the first time, but cannot get past the calibration. I have a SW EQ6 Pro mount in combination with EQMOD adapter (HitecAstro EQDIR) and ASCOM (hand controller isn't connected). PHD2 connects without issues to ASCOM and in turn ASCOM is properly connected to the mount. I am able to move the mount in any direction in ASCOM control panel. After a rough polar alignment, I slew the mount to south (near the meridian) and tried to calibrate but I'm always getting axes nearly parallel or one on top of the other (!) rather than perpendicular (getting angle values of over 70°-80°). After doing it a few dozen times, I noticed it doesn't move in all 4 directions (I expected it should because I see in status bar it tries to when calibrating), so I tried do a manual guide. Clicking north/south makes motors produce an audible sound, however absolutely nothing happens when clicking east/west, no matter what i set as a duration (just the delay gets longer). Interesting, I am able to see the pulses sent by PHD2 in ASCOM control panel, however there are no movements nor sound. I also tried drift alignment out of curiosity, but as expected there was a constant offset in RA along with constant pulses in one direction which didn't do anything. I would already think the mount is broken, however it slews without issues when clicking N/S or E/W in ASCOM control panel on every speed (on slow speeds i just hear the motors though), also it slews well in Cartes du Ciel and other programs. It just doesn't move in PHD2 and only RA (east/west).

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Vedran

[Andy Galasso]

Hi Vedran,

Is it possible that RA Pulse Guide is disabled in your EQASCOM settings?   Make sure both RA and Dec pulse guide are enabled and set to 0.90.

Andy

[Vedran Furač]

Hi Andy,

No, it is enabled and set to x0.90 (tried other values as well).

Thanks,

Vedran

[Jukka Paavilainen]

Does your camera have st4 guiding option? Might be worth trying, to get better understanding of the problem. It should not be related to ascom nor eqmod. If it slews from CdC it must be in phd. You could try to install phd again?

There is that possibilility that you have so much backslash in ra that it takes time to get it moving. Have you tryed slew west and north prior the calibration?

[Andy Galasso]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 7:12 AM, Jukka Paavilainen <jukkapaav...@gmail.com> wrote:

It should not be related to ascom nor eqmod. If it slews from CdC it must be in phd.

That does not necessarily follow.  EQASCOM (and the hardware for that matter) treats ASCOM PulseGuide commands differently from slews.   For example, you can configure EQASCOM to ignore PulseGuide commands while slews continue to work just fine (though Vedran has already ruled out this configuration as the source of his problem.)

It would probably be a good idea to ask for help in the eqmod yahoo group. The eqmod developers should be able to help you diagnose the problem.

Andy

[Vedran Furač]

Hello,

I have a QHY5 camera and there's a ST4 option which I tried as well ("on camera", bypassing the ASCOM). Actually, that would be my second question as this failed as well. It seems with ST4 cable doing a "manual guide" really does something for each direction as I can hear a distinct sound coming from gears for all 4 directions, however when looking at the star, combined with its own (earth's) movement, it's really hard to tell whether it moved in all 4 orthogonal directions, for example it's possible it moved "south" two times, when clicking "south" and "west" or perhaps not moved at all because of massive backslash even though I was able to hear the sound. Calibration result is the same as with eqmod with orthogonality error being at 70-80, nowhere near being perpendicular. Now that you say that slew and pulseguide commands differ (i.e. not just slow vs. fast), I'm seriously thinking something might be wrong with the mount (bought a used one), as if it's interpreting pulseguides incorrectly and either ignoring RA guides when using eqmod or moving either in a wrong direction or not moving properly when using ST4. Sadly, problem is very specify and hours of googling didn't help.

I tried drift align nevertheless accepting the broken calibration and to my surprise it actually said my polar error is rather low (azimuth adjustment step), especially when considering I'm doing this from my balcony window and from where I'm not seeing polaris (used compas, did some adjustments by looking at the moon). It was actually tracking the star very well (didn't even try altitude adjustment step yet), but if you look at the attached screenshot (using ST4, but looks the same with eqmod), you'll see something is very wrong with the graph (btw., selected to show pixels rather than default arc-sec in settings because I couldn't see the red line with arc-sec selected). Also, as soon as I stopped drifting and started guiding, it expectedly quickly went off and bailed out because it was unable track the star.

Thanks,

Vedran

[Vedran Furač]

Hello,

Just so that thread doesn't end without a solution and for the future reference. Soon after my last post, I figured out the issue. Silly me, I completely missed the fact that mount needs to be in tracking mode to be able to manually guide. For some reason eqmod allowed me to guide in one axis, which is what confused me. Once I booted into linux and tried PHD2 over INDI, it immediately refused to do manual guide in any direction with a clear warning message. Once tracking was enabled, the problems was resolved and I was able to guide without further issues in both windows and linux.

Thanks,

Vedran

[bw_msgboard]

Hi Vedran.  Thanks a lot for taking the time to do this, it’s a big help.  Often, people don’t bother to wrap things up, particularly if it seems like a “cockpit error.”  But the reality is, you won’t be the last person to encounter the problem and your post may save someone a bunch of time and trouble.

 

Bruce

 

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