Quote:
Originally Posted by Startrek
I’ve owned a HEQ5, one worm cycle is 9.6mins
IMO a regular short period 12arc sec spike is either intermittent spurious data drop out during a guide pulse cycle or physical damage to the worm gear or main gear on the Ra and Dec.
My hunch is the latter due to the scope hitting the mount and grinding
You couldn’t visually see damage to gearing causing a 12arc sec spike ( it’s microns )
It’s a tough one to find.
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so I did a run with no dec guiding, and I still saw Dec spikes of about 12'' so that kinda ruled out pulse data issues for me (Unless theres something really bad happening inside the pcb with data crossover) its annoying asiair wont let me disable RA guiding pulses too.
As I understand it the large brass cylinder of the worm is brass specifically to be the weaker element that might get worn away (compared to the steel(maybe) worm screw part). My assumption is that if this was worn (as you say I cant see anything) it would be worn in one place not worn all 360 degrees, at worst 8 hours out of the 24 hours for the full circle might be worn, so I could expect to at least have a 25% chance of it not be using a bad bit of the worm gear (assuming I've randomised it enough).
I find the dec spikes the most incomprehensible. Without Dec guiding, none of the dec should be doing anything! which implies somehow a fault is in the RA that somehow produces an error in the Dec (sometimes) but no spike in RA sometimes. Which seems unlikely.
I guess if comms were intermittently scrambled an RA pulse could be received as a Dec pulse. I think i need to get my laptop back online so I can run a test with PHD2 just monitoring but not issuing any pulses. Having said that though, I did set the RA only guiding to be 5% aggressive, and didnt see any changes in the sizes of the 12"" spikes. I wonder what the data packets for pulses look like.