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I cannot help much with the synscan side of things, but I can atleast help with the trailing, this is because your not dialed in exactly on the south celestial pole, the better that alignment is, the longer you can image before you get trailing stars
With your scope when the controller is behaving itself it has some routines to make polar alignment much simpler, until then I can atleast explain the manual process to get yourself aligned so you can get some longer images
How I went about finding it for my home was set the tripod up in the day where I image, but pointing about 30 degrees away from south so the leg cleared when I drew a line later on (without the scope or mount, no need for that to get hot)
Leveled it out as best I could with a bubble level, used a weight and a string off the mount screw to draw a vertical shadow under the center of the scope
Used an online calculator to work out the time of solar noon, when solar noon came, used a ruler to mark the line, extending it out to where the south leg should sit,
Measured off a point on that line to get the other 2 legs set as close to the same as possible,
Rechecked I was level, then marked off around each leg with a permernant marker so next time I just know exactly where south is for when I set up
When your imaging, make sure your tripod is level, and if you found south like I did, you can center out the 2 fine rotation screws, in the worst case when your controller is working again it lets you start from a much better polar alignment than you would usually have (phones and compasses turn out to not be as accurate as one would hope when near a chunk of metal)
Another recommendation after doing this would be align you camera with the RA / DEC axis, this way you can do a fine trim of where any other small offset is, e.g. you see the stars trail exactly horizontal, you know its an issue with your azimuth fine tuning, as for what way to adjust, I recommend taking a 1 minute exposure, and about 10 seconds in, hold the lense cover over for a few seconds, this gap will let you know which direction its drifting to trim it back the other way.
For context, I am waiting for a guide cam as I can let PHD2 work all this mess out for me, but until then, I have had to get creative.
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