ASI air plus help

[AstroBogan (Jacob)]

Hi all,

I'm trying to come up with a way to be able to run the ASI air plus through my android tablet and to be able to monitor/mirror it from inside the house on my PC (roughly 40-50m away), as the tablet loses connection to the ASI air plus from where my PC is.

I don't know of a way to do this as my PC will be connected via ethernet (no wifi chip/adapter), while the tablet will be connected to the ASI air plus' wifi connection with no internet connection. The fact that the tablet will already be connected to the ASIair's wifi means that I won't be able to remote desktop or even mirror into it.

Has anyone been able to overcome this with any form of solution?

EDIT: I don't even need to take control of the tablet from the PC, and I know I could find a way to emulate an android device using bluestacks. I just want a way to be able to monitor everything happening without having to go all the way out to the back yard.

[Astronut07 (Ben)]

Gday Jacob

Sounds like a complicated exercise to me, I have the Pro version and have always had good reception even inside my house. Admittedly not 50m away

Here is a way to improve your reception
CJ from Georgia Astronomy ( formally Rosewell Astronomy ) give a work through on connecting

https://youtu.be/GYa8RBmXbNs

I’ve know CJ for several years now & if you have any questions just shoot him a msg, he will normally get back asap

Cheers
Ben

[evltoy (Wayne)]

What your trying to do is a band-aid fix for poor network/wifi in your house.

I have built a DIY Obs from Colour-Bond and even with the everything closed up I can get reception from my ASIair plus in the obs to my tablet (front street 30mts or inside house 25mts) with no issues. - and good speed on 2.4Gb

The secret is Access Points (AP's) and not the crappy nest/D-link junk.

Get TP-Link as a minimum, Ubiguti, cisco or Aruba set it up right or get someone who knows networking to set it all up... an I'm not talking about the bloke who just reads a manual and clicks next to install by default.

I have 3x Ubiquiti AP's in my house and 1 external all running through a cisco gigabit L2 switch to a dedicated FW, router then NTU. I can walk inside my neighbors house and get reception to my ASIair Plus. I guess I would be able to do the same if I had the ASIair pro.

Most people think they have good wifi connection, speed and reliability, but the reality is 95% of them are kidding themselves.

[AstroBogan (Jacob)]

I suppose I should have prefaced my questions to say it is an old double story house with thick walls, so connection via wifi all the way to the end of the back yard will never work. It's honestly terrible from the front of the house to the back of the house or even directly above the modem upstairs is terrible. By ethernet it's perfect, but wifi not so much.

I suppose my only option is to get some form of extender.

Originally Posted by evltoy

I have 3x Ubiquiti AP's in my house and 1 external all running through a cisco gigabit L2 switch to a dedicated FW, router then NTU. I can walk inside my neighbors house and get reception to my ASIair Plus. I guess I would be able to do the same if I had the ASIair pro.

We actually use Ubiquiti AP's at work and I have been turned off by the price of some of the units, but in all honesty, I would agree that would be my only option for what I want to achieve.
I considered the ZWO extender, with the range claimed to be at 300m (unobstructed) and people seem to think that it could be up to 100m through walls and windows etc, but I don't want to buy it to be sorely disappointed.
I will look into some AP options and go with that.

Cheers all

[Dave882 (David)]

Well after struggling with ASIAIR wifi inside the house for a couple of years, I finally forked out the grand sum of $15 for a cat7 30m flat cable from eBay (you can get 50m version too) that I now run from the ASIAIR all the way to my inside modem. Sure, it takes an extra min to hook it up during setup, but once I’m connected to the home wifi it’s downloading images at approx 50mb/s. also the computer connects for all my file downloads at excellent speed. I only wish I did it sooner.

Might not be the sexiest solution but it works…

[evltoy (Wayne)]

Originally Posted by Jsmitt94

I suppose I should have prefaced my questions to say it is an old double story house with thick walls, so connection via wifi all the way to the end of the back yard will never work. It's honestly terrible from the front of the house to the back of the house or even directly above the modem upstairs is terrible. By ethernet it's perfect, but wifi not so much.:

Even more reason to have AP's. A Double brick house is a solid house I would love to own, but yes.. signal cant penetrate well. Do it right the first time and save the headaches and wasted money buying a range extender. Range extenders give crap speeds and you will be questioning why you went down that path later on.

A cheap way pending what router/wifi you own, you can buy a few internal AP's for inside the house, get one external AP attached to an external wall in the backyard, wire (cat6e) it all up to your router, disable the wifi on the router and setup AP mesh (1 SSID across all AP's and your devices will roam automatically to the strongest single anywhere around the house)... I'm being very high level.

[evltoy (Wayne)]

Originally Posted by Dave882

Well after struggling with ASIAIR wifi inside the house for a couple of years, I finally forked out the grand sum of $15 for a cat7 30m flat cable from eBay (you can get 50m version too) that I now run from the ASIAIR all the way to my inside modem. Sure, it takes an extra min to hook it up during setup, but once I’m connected to the home wifi it’s downloading images at approx 50mb/s. also the computer connects for all my file downloads at excellent speed. I only wish I did it sooner.

Might not be the sexiest solution but it works…

Cable is good until a kid/pet or even yourself trips over it (early hrs in the morning and still half asleep) and yanks it out of the port and if your lucky you lose a night due to scope no longer aligned or damage the port or cable...

[Dave882 (David)]

Originally Posted by evltoy

Cable is good until a kid/pet or even yourself trips over it (early hrs in the morning and still half asleep) and yanks it out of the port and if your lucky you lose a night due to scope no longer aligned or damage the port or cable...

Agreed that is a risk, but I just run it with my power. Good cable management at the scope end prevents any accidents

[evltoy (Wayne)]

Originally Posted by Dave882

Agreed that is a risk, but I just run it with my power. Good cable management at the scope end prevents any accidents

Cable management is always King. I just hope you dont run the ethernet cable in parallel to you power cable... bad practice even when using cat6 and above

[Dave882 (David)]

Originally Posted by evltoy

Cable management is always King. I just hope you dont run the ethernet cable in parallel to you power cable... bad practice even when using cat6 and above

Yeah if it were a permanent run in conduit you’d certainly run separately but as a roll-out / roll-in solution I found the convenience was the key factor. I’ve never had any issues with the data transfer and it’s many times more stable than wifi. Anyways I recognise it’s not for everyone but for me, for a grand total spend of $15 it was a game changer. Just my 2c