I have a SkyWatcher AZGTi mount which has encoders, but unfortunately not too accurate so I do not use this feature at all. My problem is that if I connect SkySafari to the mount via SynScanLink, this feature is hard on and there is no option to get rid of it. in SynScan app this feature is turned off by default, so it is positioning correctly, but when I control my mount via SkySafari, goto positioning is inaccurate due to inaccurate encoder data coming from the mount. Thank you for your support in advance!
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Steenkh I do not understand how the mount can work without encoders? Surely, the mount must be able to sense how far it moves in order to be accurate?
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Tamás Fehér Not necessarily... It is an extra feature, not something essential. There are mounts without encoders obviously can't detect manual movement. SkyWatcher has two variants, for example: AZGTi and AZGTe. I can manually turn on or off encoder feature in SynScan app, but not in SkySafari. That's why I raised this question. Pointing accuracy is worse when encoders are on...
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Steenkh I have the same mount, so I am very interested in this subject. Since I bought the telescope a couple of months ago, the weather has been consistently bad, so I have only had the telescope out for a couple of nights, and I am only learning about its quirks. The first night I could not make the SynScan app work because it crashed, so I had to to use the hand controller from my other telescope to control it. This worked fine, also together with SkySafari.
A couple of weeks ago, I was out again, and this time the SynScan app worked fine, but the positioning was completely wrong, no matter how often I repeated the alignment. I wonder if I was hit by the phenomenon that you mention. But until now I had convinced myself that I had not tightened the alignment screws sufficiently. Next time, I’ll try to see if it works better with just the SynScan app.
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Steenkh I managed to test it, and you are right: it works with the SynScan app, but not with SkySafari.
But why do you think that it is caused by the encoder setting? I never once moved the telescope by hand, and yet SkySafari was way off right from the moment when it connected. I think this is caused by SkySafari reading the wrong position, or perhaps even a general breakdown of communication. I am going to open a new thread with what I see as a general problem with SkySafari and AZGTi.
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Tamás Fehér Why would I think this is caused by the encoder? It's simple... Goto positioning is accurate in SynScan is I do not activate encoder readout, but inaccurate when it is on. It's also described in AZGTi manual, if no need for manual slewing, it is always better to have this option turned off. And one more thing: I also use Luminos app (via the same SynScanlink method), which is not using encoder readout - its goto accuracy is always better than SkySafari's... For me it's more than suspicious.
Anyway - it would be good to have an option to turn off encoder readout.
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