[xthestreams (Paul)]

NOTE: Edited as I think I figured out what I've done wrong, will test tonight.

Despite having a 6AM start today I used the little bit of cloud free sky last night to get a couple of hours in with the EQ8-R and it's not all great news.

For clarity, my anti-Windows stance gets me into trouble as it limits be to INDI based drivers and some of the issues described MIGHT be attributable to that, but I suspect there's something deeper going on.

First up, the Autohome feature and API is almost certainly different between the EQ8 and EQ8-R due to the lack of Freedom Find Aux encoders on the EQ8-R with the new home sensors being in place instead. Logged a bug report with teh INDI developers and have gone to SkyWatcher to see if they can shed any light, but from what I can see this might also be a problem for the ASCOM drivers - if anyone has a different experience, would love to know.

Then there's PPEC - it all started with trying to diagnose the tracking and guiding challenges I was having.

Again to be clear this is with a local FL scope (2000+mm) and the seeing during my first attempt at tracking/guiding wasn't great - how much of this has to do with the mount versus my still poor grasp of EKOS is up for debate, I am sure at least 50% of this is me.

Anyways, last night I set EKOS to guide but disabled the sending pulse commands to the mount to see how well it would track without guiding. The answer was pretty well on the E/W axis but terribly (+/- 5arcsecs) on the N/S - I am guessing the scope is too symmetrically balanced, something that will hopefully be less of an issue when the new motorised Moonlite arrives to add some ballast East-side down, until now I might try a small weight on the left hand side of the dovetail.

So, I decided to play with PPEC - did that through the INDI control panel, started training first the Dec and then the RA axis - took about 4 minutes a piece and here's where the fun started.

I enabled PPEC after training and the mount started slewing the RA axis rapidly, like it was tracking at a custom (faster than sidereal) rate to the point that it exceeded my horizon limits. I left it go as long as my heart-rate could bear and then had to switch off PPEC at which point the mount appears to be behaving normally.

Then I took at look at my OAG images and noticed it wasn't holding stars at all - it appeared that the DEC axis was going something similar albeit at a much slower rate.

So, long story short - if you're using INDI EQMOD and an EQ8-R I'd love to know if I'm the only one having this problem and if so, how are others using the PPEC feature?

I guess the same question applies for EQMOD on ASCOM.

Even shorter story, EQ8-R may still have some teething issues when it comes to direct control via USB (vs. handset)

P.S. I thought I would play around with teh handset controller and see if there was anything obvious and of course as I looked at the PEC training function I think I realised my mistake, with guiding "on" but inactive (not sending pulses) there was nothing correcting the scope and so the training was erroneous. Hopefully I can clear the training back to factory and start again tonight.