HandyAvi^® - Serial Port Selection for Telescope Control

HandyAvi^® has a Tools menu item called "Select Serial Port" that will bring up the following panel:

This panel allows you to select the serial port that your Meade^® telescope is connected to. As shown above, all of the listed ports are "Ready...".

If a port is being used or is otherwise unavailable for some inexplicable reason, it will be shown as "Busy...".

You cannot connect your telescope to a port that is already "busy".

We have noticed that some USB/Serial cables sometimes say they are busy when they should not. This condition can usually be corrected by disconnecting the USB/Serial cable then reconnecting it. Rebooting your machine should resolve the problem if it cannot otherwise be resolved.

We have often used the freeware program DevManView available on the internet to investigate unusual COM problems such as the same COM port being assigned to two different devices simultaneously! Or multiple "COM3" ports! These sorts of problems are infrequent but cannot be debugged without using a tool like DevManView.

We have found HandyAvi's "Ready" and "Busy" indicators to be invaluable in understanding what is happening when we cannot connect to a serial port when we are using other astronomy programs such as ACP. The fault has never been with ACP but we have found that the USB/Serial adapters and programs can often misbehave in strange ways...