PHD2 Parmount MX+ and meridian flips

Summary: Can someone let me know what TSX (ascom), PHD2 and Voyager settings I need to make PHD2 work after a meridian flip ?

I have an MX+ but I want to use PHD2 for guiding on narrow band rather than native TSX guiding.

We have had two clear nights here in UK so I set up Voyager to work overnight.

The first night I observed voyager / PHD2 / TSX working for about nine HA frames but then then I got a PHD2 error “phd2 is not able to make sufficient corrections in ra”.

I recalibrated and PHD2 worked fine.

Yesterday, during daylight, I looked at the Voyager and PHD logs to work out what the problem was and discovered that PHD2 stopped working after the meridian flip. So, I conducted some research on the internet and emailed Leonardo (helpful as always – thank you). I enabled “Can get pointing state” in the TSX ASCOM driver, but I got the same issue last night. The alert message was slightly different but I (stupidly) didn’t take a note of it and can’t see it in either the debug or guiding log.

Next chance I get, I am going to try PHD2 tool “Calibrate the meridian flip” to see if I need to enable PHD2 setting “Reverse dec output after the meridian flip”, but as is typical in UK it’s going to be cloudy for at least the next 7 days.

Does anyone have experience of using PHD2, Voyager and TSX (ASCOM driver) ? If so can you help me with settings ?

Thank you

I use phd2,TSX, paramount Myt, and voyager. In Phd2 make sure Reverse dec output after meridian flip is checked. In TSX under camera setup make sure auto- reverse for Gems is unchecked.
Hope that helps.

Nothing to do Voyager side … you can just decide if calibrate or not in the sequence configuration.
My advice is to calibrate each time in Sequence, otherwise like Ed wrote to you this is a task to perform PHD2 side with the settings suggested.

All the best
Leonardo

Thank you Ed, I will try that.

Thank you, Leonardo, your input is always welcome. I completely accept that my issue is not a Voyager short coming, but it is linked to Voyager as it occurs when I use Voyager. As such it might be of interest to Voyager users.

I always start each drag script with a PHD2 calibration, I would like to avoid doing another on Meridian flip as calibration takes too long and is not strictly necessary. I will feedback on this forum in case anyone else has this issue.

Ian, I am interested in the clear message that to work properly Voyager needs external software to be installed and configured correctly for what you intend to do.

I’m also interested in passing the message that calibrating the mount based on the target is not a waste of time but would be the right thing to do in real situations. You can argue about whether your setup comes close to the ideal mathematical model that just calibrating once means, but here everyone is obviously free to act at their discretion.

Thanks Leonardo. I guess it all depends on how accurate the MX+ meridian flip is. The more imaging I do the more I believe in quality of data not quantity. I think I may take your advice and inject a recalibration on meridian flip.

Can you add “Inject recalibration on Meridian Flip” to the Sequence Configuration ?

Ian