What Patrick says is true. The AS must think it is aligned and tracking before the serial port becomes fully active. You can get around doing a full alignment if you do a "GoTo" an astronomical target from the hand pad. This will start the full serial interface. Your alignment may or may not be worth a hoot at this point. You can use the hand pad and manually sync to the current object. A caveat with this procedure is that if you are precisely polar aligned and you make a Dec adjustment from the handpad it will in effect rotate what the AS perceives as the celestial sphere by that much. I have had better luck just un-clutching and manually centering.
I was able to duplicate your original findings using the Meade interface, not the ASCOM interface and only then buy not aligning the AS from the handpad. The ASCOM interface will not allow the "Set Time" or "Set Location" with the AS using ASCOM 4.1 with the newest Meade 4.1.14 drivers. Also note that in the serial interface command set the AS(I) is listed as the "Sync" command not being fully implemented. This may or may not be true, as the command set pdf from Meade has not been updated in a long while. Anyway what I am saying is that I am unable to break either interface on my system while staying within the documented parameters of either interface. I hope some of this helps. Bob --- In [email protected], "brisleyastro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I went to the ASCOM site and downloaded the latest from there. > Brian >
