I have a question/clarification of the relationship between APCC and the ASCOM V2 driver for Ray or anybody who knows the answer for sure…

My question has to do specifically with the initialization phase and whether anything needs to be initialized in the Driver separately if auto-connecting and starting the driver from APCC.

APCC has a “NOW” button that can be used to auto-configure the driver, but it isn’t clear to me whether this configures only information like the port, time-out parameters and so forth, or does it communication that information plus information about local time-zone, latitude and longitude information, park information and so forth? Or, I guess the third option is whether the driver needs to know site information as long as APCC knows this information?

I found this statement in the APCC manual:

Note that the location, mount type, park and initialization settings in the ASCOM V2 driver are independent of the settings in APCC. You will create and adjust these settings within APCC. Refer to the ASCOM manual for additional settings that are useful when using APCC.

This seems to imply that I don’t need to make any of these settings in the driver itself.  Is this true even if I tick the auto-config and auto-connect boxes in the Driver section of APCC?

To further clarify (only if necessary), my workflow in the past for a portable setup has been to setup the site information in the Driver and in APCC, then I ticked the auto-connect box anyhow and this seemed to work.  (But I never understood whether I really needed to configure the site information in the driver ahead of time.)  After a year-long hiatus, my workflow this year has been to start APCC with the auto-configure and auto-connect buttons unticked, and to use the “NOW” button and “CONNECT” buttons to initiate the driver.  In this work flow, I have not been setting the driver site (and other) information independently, and that also works.

I realize that I could experimentally determine what I need to configure independently in the driver, but I wish I understood enough about the relationship between APCC and the Driver to be able to have that answer in my mental picture of the system.

Thanks and regards,

Craig