I bought the MGEN3 for guiding with an Altair Astro 60mm guide scope on my Skywatcher 130mm and 20mm Newts. I had tried phd guiding but I had problems, probably because my laptop was old and underpowered. I also ran Cartes du Ciel and Sharpcap to control my Skywatcher AZ EQ6 mount and camera. I had a lot of issues until I replaced the laptop. I am currently having an issue of Cartes taking 35 secs to start up which is weird and frustrating.
At the start of my astro journey I used a full frame Sony A7III DSLR and after having to make a cable to connect to MGEN and the camera as one was unavailable, I was able to dither the camera, see where I was pointing with Cartes and control the camera with Sharpcap. MGEN hangs on the side of the scope and when it starts up after taking a dark frame and providing guide and main scope focal lengths it is ready to go, so all I had to do was press a start guiding button and it would perform a 2 axis cal, find a number of starts and start guiding, providing 2 axes guiding graphs. It will even do a polar alignment but it won't make the tea!. It can be confused by a very bright star in the frame,so the gain would need adjusting and if I wobbled the scope even a tiny amount it would stop guiding so I would need to start it off again which only took say 2 mins.
Later I bought a ZWO ASI 2600MC OSC camera and I could no longer dither the camera and that function isn't possible directly, but everything else worked fine. Recently it has been possible to select the MGEN in Sharpcap and see it as a virtual instrument but only up to gain 100 and with no colour correction. ZWO will not ament the drivers to allow a higher gain although in Sharpcap and slecting ZWO as the camera I can use a gain up to about 650 and also balance colour in G and B. This is a serious limitation as I use higher gains for focussing and for narrowband as I now also have the mono 2600MM version. Lacerta who make the MGEN have told me that before too long I should be able to control the MGEN in phd. The question is when?

I have flexure between the guide scope and main scope and this means that successive images move very slightly with respect to each other but not enough to be a serious problem. This is because I have the guide scope mounted on the scope side bracket. This has the novel advantage of providing dithering due to the successive image movement. If I mount the guide scope of another dovetail I have mounted on the opposite side of the one holding the scope, providing a rigid frame, then flexure disappears, as does the dithering and the stacked images suffer considerably.

The inability to see the MGEN as a virtual instrument in Sharpcap at gains >100 means that a few weeks ago when imaging through the night 1 missed 2 hours because guiding failed for some reason but I wasn't able to tell without going outside and looking at the guide graph.

For this reason I have just bought a guide scope camera and will try out phd and then I will be able to control guiding set up and see guide graphs from my workstation, which is connected to my laptop via wi fi and Radmin Viewer.

Last night MGEN indicated that it's multi star guiding was 0.3 to 0.4 arc secs so it will be interesting to see what phd can provide.
I hope this may be of interest to someone, you never know. Clear skies and enough cloudy ones to get some sleep, for those of us not fully automatic.
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