I've tried this on all HEQ5 drivers (Celestron GPS, nexstar, eqmod) and it screws up location/time info on all of them

EDIT: Scenario is Kstars/Ekos on Mac connected wifi to stellarmate, connected to HEQ5 via hand controller

Does your Celestron send the time? Do you have this in the log? For EQMod, I found that it send the time, but not the UTC offset, so the time in KStars is not correct. However, EQMod only send system time of StellarMate, so if that's not accurate then it is not very useful. It does NOT inquire time from handset.

Yes, I am seeing the stellarmate system time. I don't know where it gets the long/lat - my actual long/lat showing in the hand controller is -73 42 / 45 26 N

EDIT: The lat/long comes from the original setting in the local Kstars on the Mac.

Attached is the log

So EQMod was actually setting the time _every_ second when it's suppose just to define it once on startup like other drivers. So that's updated. But using EQMod as basis of time/location is by itself not useful unless you have a GPS around since EQMod would just send the system time, which is what KStars would be using anyway, unless StellarMate & KStars have huge drift, in this case, I'd trust the time on KStars on MacOS than StellarMate and would use KStars as the basis of time.

For other mounts such as Celestron, it can send the controller time and location. But other drivers like Synscan do not as they do not access this information, at least in the current driver. If you're having issues with time, either get a GPS dongle, or use GPS-NMEA driver, or just rely on your MacOS time.