Ive been changing over my control of the HEQ5-Pro in collaboration with Peter Bester. This was an attempt to change some of my attitudes and to try out EQMOD with the synta system.
I had got fed up with the hand controller and the inaccuracies of the Synta pointing software so a new regime was installed. I purchased a TTL-232R FTDI USB to Serial (TTL level 5V) converter cable from Dontronics (
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/) so that I could do away with the handcontroller and use one cable for EQMOD and autoguiding. I then bought a PC gamepad and set this up for remote controlling of the mount. No more cables here. Really accurate goto as claimed by EQMOD - now all objects on the chip of DSI 2 pro chip, which is quite small. Complete planning and control of scope and goto using Astroplanner and quick polar alignment using WCS. I was using PhD guiding for the pulseguide of the scope but I found it was sucking the brains out of my laptop when I had a few programs running. Also the guiding was a bit erratic so I switched to Guidemaster. What a difference, where I used to have some slight ovality to my stars on some frames, all of the guided shots with guidemaster were perfect stars and no guiding errors. The guiding was perfect.
Now I have an imaging setup that I can use in my backyard for small galaxies that defeats the BrisVegas light pollution and with very few cables running to the mount. Its more accurate at all levels and simpler to setup and tear down at night.
If you have an HEQ5 or EQ6 mount try EQMOD. I was reluctant but perservered and will never go back to the handpaddle control.
The shot of M61 was a quickie stack of 10x1min with the DSI 2 Pro