From: "doodlebun" <gbleser@bellsouth.net>

Date: April 22, 2010 12:04:10 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Flea 3 question about compatibility with AstroIIDC and gain considerations.

In the past week a ground swell of excitement is building for the new PGR Flea3 camera.

Anthony Wesley (Bird) is singing the praises of this camera but he doesn't use Astro IIDC.  He brought up a gain issue that I would like to hear some expert commentary by Milton before I spend $500+ for this camera. Straight from the horses mouth...

Ok, I've heard back from PGR about something I noticed on the Flea3, I didn't want to say too much before checking with them in case this interesting behaviour was going to somehow "go away" in future, but they seem happy enough with it.

The Flea3 officially supports gain values from -2db to 24db, *but* this can be easily bypassed and gain values up to 33.2db are possible. The image is amazingly bright at 33.2db and the background noise is still very low. This is a killer feature of the camera, but you need software that will know how to access this extra gain or else you'll see a limit of 24db.

Coriander under Linux supports the over-gain values as-is, and for Windows users I've emailed Torsten about adding support into Firecapture for it.

The way to access the exctra gain is very easy really - the camera control registers have two ways to set the gain, either a slider value from 0 to 762 that is mapped onto gain values between -2db and 24db, or using the "absolute value" registers where you write the actual gain value requested as a floating point number.

In the second case, using the absolute value register for gain its possible to input values up to 33.2 and the camera responds accordingly :-)

With the extra gain headroom this camera is far and away the best of any cameras that I've tested.

cheers, Bird