Schizophrenic EQ6?

[Doug]

My EQ6 with v301 synscan has been working rather well until last night.
It is pier mounted and would characteristically go straight to target even without an alignment cycle; well ok not dead center, but within EP fov.
Last night it insisted that Sirius lives in the far south west of Sydney skies.:eyepop:
I had never used the show position function before, however I now notice that I get 2 lines of info on the screen, including after a 'park' operation.
top line reads something like 20h 30', +90. The second line reads 360d -90
It can't be both + and - declination!

Is it normal for the position display to have 2 lines, any body know?

The book of words indicated that powering off without park would loose setup data, ie reset memory, but it will not loose the date lat, longitude time zone. Date does not increment of course since time is not kept after powerdown. It simply refuses to look in the right part of the sky anymore.

Remember this was functioning correctly and yes the Longitude is set to E,
Lat set to S Time zone +10 and I use sidereal time not DST. besides I doubt if any error in setup parameters could put Sirius in the wrong quadrant of the sky.
Another anomaly is that Sirius has disappeared from the list of star names, except in the alignment mode, in other words, I can not select Sirius as an object to view.
Just wondering if anyone has encountered this problem or if it is known if there is a 'Ctrl Alt Del' style powerup reset available, if not, then it looks like it will have to go back to Tasco Hospital.

[h0ughy]

interesting I havent had that happen to me yet? might look into that one. Ring Rob at Tasco and discuss it with him, maybe it has been found and a software update might fix it?

[Astroman]

I had a similar problem but this was with the EQ Direct ASCOM driver, In the home position I told the mount to slew to Canopus, and it ended up pointing in the north about 5 degrees above the horizon, every time I did it it ended up going to the same spot. I found out that the previous alignment data was being kept even after I had re aligned.

I dont know if this is anything like what you are getting but might be a clue? Sounds like a system reset might need to be done if you are losing stars or objects, something has obviously got corrupted. Or an upgrade to the newer firmware?

But ring Rob first at Tasco and maybe they can help you out more.

[Doug]

Thanks for your replies guys, I'll give Rob a ring, hope he is back at work. It sounds like a S/W corruption issue, I spent a considerable amount of time trying things like power on while pressimg Esc + Enter, never found the magic combo if one exists. I'll report back later.

[Doug]

Ok, so I took the controller over to Tasco, along with the mount.
Rob knew of no keypad procedure to reset to factory default parameters, however as I had been supplied with a Beta v3.1 controller instead of the final edition he downloaded the latest firmware. And seemed to think that was that. Not so. I persuaded him to try the contoller out on a HEQ5 mount that was there. We set the time to 2000 hours and sent it off looking for Sirius which it should have thought was about mid way up at the East of its polar axis. It drove the imaginary scope to look below the virtual south western horizon. The amazing thing is that it seems all smoke has been left intact in the various components else it would just not do anything, yet firmware update did not solve the problem.

I left with a new controller, thanks Tasco, and now the mount is drift aligned to 15min accuracy.

[Astroman]

good stuff Doug, glad you worked out what was wrong, and good on Tasco for replacing the unit too.

[h0ughy]

nice ending