I been using SharpCap for nearly five years and I have greatly admired Dr. Glover's responsiveness to his end users.
Pretty much unheard of these days in customer support.
One issue Robin is often trying address is those without Wi-Fi data transmission off the OTA and mount.
Most of the affordable solutions providing USB hubs and 12V DC power are still tried to a USB cable off the mount.
Yes, they are short for a reason.
However, as many can attest a short cable is impractical when your work flow is not tried to a Raspberry PI and on the mount storage.
And in that scenario, most likely you have Wi-Fi connectivity anyway.
So, cable length is a critical factor for USB direct connection to a laptop.
I have been using very successfully a powered USB 3.0 Active Cable of over fifty feet in length for nearly two years now with an Astro Pegasus Advanced PowerBox(Gen2) without any of the issues associated with the length of the USB cable.
All ASCOM communications associated cable length issues with my mount and OTA have dropped to zero.
As in Zillich.
The cable comes with an AC power transformer. But this is not necessary nor needed if you connect to a USB 3.0 or better power supplied port on your laptop.
A USB Active Cable has USB hub repeaters that are completely able to be powered by your laptop so the AC power transformer is not needed.
There are a number of Active Cables on the market to consider. They are expansive. Mine was well over 120 USD.
Active USB cables are not just signal boosting USB cables, they are actual USB hubs hard wired into the cable.
So be mindfully to only select a cable with no more than two repeaters since Windows OS will complain about the number of hubs strung along the cable.
To the best of my understanding it is the fifth hub that Windows OS rejects. Basically, the USB hub on the mount counts as one and the laptop is a hub, so the USB power/repeater cable cannot have more than two repeater hubs in the cable.
Windows will not connect the equipment if there are three or more of these hub repeaters in the cable because the total will be greater than four.
Two repeater hubs in the cable work just fine.
It was a hard lesson learned, because when I first bought a USB Active Cable. I bought one with three repeater hubs.
No problem directly connecting that 100-foot USB to my camera directly to my laptop. But connect that cable to the Powerbox's USB hub and nothing but OS USB notifications that you are trying to connect equipment through five USB hubs.
Best Regards,
Mark
- This USB cable is 50 feet in length
- Active USB Cable.png (808.35 KiB) Viewed 4108 times
