Jamie,
Re you suspicions about calibration:
Calibration would not be sensitive to a failure of the swap-dec mechanism. The way calibration works, it pushes RA (and then DEC) one way, and just just notes which way it goes on the image and how much "push" it take to get it there. Then it reverses the direction of the push, and tries to get back to where it started. Therefore, calibration isn't sensitive to which direction it goes--it's happy if the mount moves in any direction initially, and it makes a note of that direction (in fact the specific angle relative to the guide image).
What can make calibration fail is (a) losing track of the guide star that it's following during that process, either due to clouds/obstructions/focus, or an issue with the StellarSolver configuration, or (b) some mount/mechanical/cable issue which would cause the mount not to move out (while being pushed by the initial pulses), or not to move back when the pulses are reversed.
BTW, it would be good to share the calibration you have. For instance, here's a screenshot of my current calibration:
You can see that the RA and DEC are "roughly" 90 degrees apart, as they should be (319 degrees vs 234 degrees),
and that the estimated push to move an arc-second are129.6ms in RA and 155.3ms in DEC.
I know mounts and optics are different, so you may get different numbers.
I have used the new software many times in the past few weeks (though good and bad seeing)
and the performance is "as expected". Before it became part of the beta release, 3 other folks tested it out
and all had decent performance.
My settings are below:
and I'm using GPG for my RA guiding with these settings:
My guide scope is an Orion ST80, mount an Orion Atlas Pro, and QHY 5LIIm guide camera.
FWIW, my main OTA is a 10" RC at ~2000mm focal length.
My guiding is ok, not super, which is what you'd expect on the equipment I have with a heavy
OTA on the Atlas Pro, I can get .6 RMS error on a super night guiding in the northern part of the sky
(but of course not very close to the pole), but more typically it's 0.8 - 1.0.
I never get guiding performance like Peter Kennett showed in his original post, but his mount is
much higher quality than mine.
There are plenty of folks since the release who, I understand, are succeeding with this new software,
but certainly there can be an issue with it, or with some other changes that were made since,
and if there is, we'll hopefully find it soon.
I do appreciate your help in trying to resolve these issues, and I'll do my best too.
Hy