OK, after pulling my hair out on this i tried simply sending 30 sync commands in a row, one pack command with 30 iterations all at once then started the normal sync and other commands. This worked! Purely a guess that it took many characters for the serial port and cam to sync baud?? but its working. The confusing part was that after the first couple of syncs i would get an ACK but then subsequent commands, like set picture size, would never get a response.

Thunder, the shortcut to find the frame num with hex worked great, removing the leading 0x's did not, complained at runtime. Appreciate you looking at this for me.