well. the camera/mount/phd situation is pretty well covered...
EQMOD.
EQMOD is a free set of drivers and control programs so that you can use your EQ5/EQ6 mounts without the use of the hand controller, Full scope control is passed to the PC, and the amount of features it has is utterly astounding... You can tune your RA tracking rate, you can very very accurately fine tune your guiding by adjusting the autoguider rate on RA and Dec independently... you can also use a "Guide command Gain" function, to amplify or reduce guiding signals after they come out of PHD, but before they go to the mount.. so PHD functions as normal, but if the commands seem to be a bit weak, EQMOD can amplify them to compensate, or can reduce them if PHD is overcorrecting the guiding errors.
It also includes a very very powerful pointing model routine. where you can chose as many alignment stars as you have time for, the more allignment stars, the better your pointing model, hence, the better the accuracy of the mounts GOTO commands.. After a 10 star alignment I was able to land every object I selected smack bang in the center of my cameras sensor... a big big plus. It also includes add on features like EQMosaic, PECPREP etc for shooting mosaic images, and for recording pe and correcting for it...
Pecrecorder is actually very very nice.. It can take a PHD log file, and work out the periodic error that the guider has corrected for (As opposed to actual drift) and then save a PEC file for EQMOD to use as a Periodic Error Correction table... And from then on in, EQMOD will automattically compensate for your mounts periodic error.. making your guider do less work, and your mount track more smoothly...
Its a brilliant bit of software.. All it requires is an ASCOM compliant planetarium programe (like The Sky, Starry Night, Stellarium etc) a $30USD EQDIR adapter from shoestring astronomy and a USB->Serial adapter...
Its well worth checking out in any case Baz, as with your setup permanently mounted, you can save your alignment data (say you do >10 star alignment) and the next time you fire up your mount, load that alignment data, do a sync on 1 star and you're away with 0.144 arc sec pointing accuracy...
Alex