James created a new topic ' EQMOD/EQ6-R regression/fault?' in the forum. 1 year ago

Hi,
Tearing my hair out over this one!
So I have run a rig with Ekos/KStars for a good long while now without issue and know my way around pretty well. My setup is two Pis, one running INDIserver on the telescope and one in the warm running KStars, Ekos, and PHD2. Both are Pi 4s, 8G.
The setup is a 200PDS and a EQ-6R Pro, early version. Two ZWO cams for image and guide, and off-axis guiding. Sesto senso focusmotor. Power is plentiful via a Nevada linear PSU, and slewing is smooth and consistent. There's been no mechanical change to the setup in years, aside from a successful mount rebuild which has been working fine.

I bumped to INDI 1.9.7 and KStars and Ekos seem very confused about what's going on. With the scope booted up from cold, with no alignment/mount config, pointing roughly at polaris in the default park position, plate solving correctly finds the location and KStars shows the mount position as it is on the mount position overlay.

However, Ekos is showing the error in alignment as huge - >200,000 arcseconds - on more or less every solve. I can't discern a pattern. Even when pointing at the same location and platesolving twice I get huge errors. Slewing by right-click on a target in KStars points the mount incorrectly in real terms and Ekos still shows error but in slew to target mode doesn't actually move the mount. The result is that I can't point the scope.

I have wiped all the config, started from scratch twice, checked everything mechanically, and verified the fundamentals (GPS position is right and being used everywhere I can see, time is NTP-synchronised on both devices to a local grandmaster and UK pool, nothing's under huge load). PHD2 polar align reckons about 7 arcminutes of PA error, which isn't great but should be perfectly fine for the basics. I've tried with both the Align and Alignment subsystems, and the closest I can find to an error message anywhere is "[ALIGNMENT] Failed TransformTelescopeToCelestial" a bunch in logs.

At my wits end when it comes to further diagnostics - any suggestions for approaches on how to figure out what might be going on? Debug logs attached.

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