[pvelez (Pete)]

I posted a few days back on the Software Bisque forum about constant drift in RA I had encountered on my PMX. I reseated the worm, adjusted the cam stop, collected data for a PEC and a 300 point TPoint model. All of this with Protrack made a big difference.


But...



After 3 days of rain, I decided to refine my guiding settings. I found that Protrack threw the tracking out. So I did a plate solve and found that my TPoint model had drifted by over 1 degree over the last 3 days. Rehoming the mount made no difference to this (though Protrack seemed to sort itself out after this).

I rebooted my pc and found that TSX had decided to dump my carefully compiled TPoint model! I'm doing another as I type.

So my question is this - is it possible that I have some dodgy firmware in the mount or a corrupt version of TSX? Because the drift in the TPoint model over 3 days by 1 degree equates to (very) roughly 0.6 arc seconds per minute. Which is not that dissimilar to what I am seeing with my RA drift.

Could these be connected?

Is there a way to check this?

I am quite happy now that almost all mechanical issues have been eliminated - the next step is to swap over the Dec and RA worm. But if its software or firmware related, that might be an easier fix.

Anyone seen this before?

Pete