Hi David.

My experience after ten years of ownership of the original Paramount MX was that they could be a bit temperamental, in particular, if a mount stall occurs during homing or slewing (due to an overcurrent situation) the drive motors are effectively short-circuited to initiate an emergency stop and depending on various local variables, such as USB cable length, ground isolation etc., then the sudden power surge would cause the USB connection to be disrupted at the mount electronics end.

If that occurs and you then tried to carry out a reconnect to the mount from the controller application, without first power-cycling the mount, then the ASCOM driver would randomly have some of it's settings returned to default. I think because the mount does not respond to the connection attempt and remains invisible to the ASCOM driver which for some reason resets the ASCOM driver parameters.

Unfortunately, when working remotely you are not always aware that the mount has stalled, there is no reliable indication in TheSky, you need to be physically present to hear the alarm bleeps from mount controller and see the mount motor LED status colours and blink frequency to confirm that a motor stall has occurred and on which axis.

One thing I found improved the situation was to install a USB2 High Speed galvanic isolator in the USB2 cable between the controller computer and the Paramount.

The isolator doesn't stop the mount stalls, which can have a multitude of causes, but the isolator did help to prevent the control board USB interface in the mount from locking up after a mount emergency stop condition.

Whenever you have a Paramount error while homing or slewing and you can't be physically present to diagnose the mount alarm bleeps and LED's status then always power cycle the mount before trying to re-establish a driver connection to the mount from ACP, MaxIm or FocusMax and that *may* help to reduce the frequency of Software Bisque's ASCOM driver settings being reset.

William.