Up until now, my routine has been to carry my laptop out to the scope and hook it up to the power supply and the USB hub connected to all the gear. The laptop outdoors is in range of my home WiFi network, so I can go back inside the house and use another PC indoors to remote-control the laptop (using VNC.)
This has been very convenient, but not ideal. For monitoring the PHD graph and other things, it is fine. But the wifi signal outdoors at the scope is not very strong and sometimes the connection drops. The remote control program shows the remote machine at a lower resolution and lower color depth, so I can't really see the quality of the subs.
So here's the improvement: I picked up a pair of these gadgets:
and 100ft Cat5e ethernet cable. I had heard good things about these particular USB extenders in the past, but the list price was way too expensive to justify trying them. Then I found a someone selling them on eBay for well under the list price, so I had to give it a try.The pair of units arrived yesterday so I set them up and tested them out. I leave the "REX" unit at the scope connected to the USB hub with all the gear. The laptop stays indoors, connected to the "LEX" unit. The LEX/REX units are connected to each other by the long ethernet cable.
From the imaging software point of view, it's exactly the same as if the laptop were outdoors. But now I have the laptop indoors with me. No more remote control, WiFi connection drops, or toting the laptop back and forth.
I did two nights of testing with guiding, running the imaging camera and focuser and everything seems to work ok. These were not real imaging sessions (cloudy skies) but I had no problems so it is looking like this may have been a worthwhile investment.
