Another winner Bruce. The CV

Another winner Bruce. The CV 19 problem was one that a fellow club member discovered last weekend. When doing research on the issue he had found something on the web and said to me you read that and see if you get the same thing I do from it. That is when we discovered something about only one 0 to disable CV19 as it will not delete the consist if more than one 0 is entered.

Had we had this great article to read last month it would have saved us much aggravation and pondering. I believe we will begin putting together a set of dcc tips and tricks for decoder programing so everyone in the club can use them with out having to discover the thing for themselves. Many times with out this it is like being the first guy to discover fire or invent the wheel.

Different brands, different address ranges.

The first time I ran consists on the club layout, I set all of my consist addresses with CV19 via DecoderPro at home before I left for the club.

For no good reason I set the consist addresses in the low 120's. After all, that worked fine with my NCE powercab. Doing a little research I found that, unfortunately, the club uses a Lenz system.  Lenz only allows consist and short addresses in the 1-99 range.  All of my locomotives just sat there motionless.

So, now I keep all of my consist addresses in the range of 1-99.  That will work on any system. Just to give my aging memory a helping hand, I use the last two digits of the lead locomotive's address for my consist address.  So far, I don't have enough locomotives to cause an overlap of addresses.

Too bad I didn't have your article back then.  gs 

DCC consisting

Congratulations on bringing clarity to a now seemingly 'simple' but previously murky subject. You've essentially illuminated the text of my technical manual. I'm now ready to confidently employ consisting with my NCE PowerCab. Great work Bruce.

Thanks for this superb MU reference.

RP

DCC Impulses Consisting article

To Bruce Petraca,

your assessment of Digitrax consisting support is wrong.  Digitrax does support creating an Advanced consist directly, at least if you are using a DCS100/DCS200 command station.  There is no prompting when creating a consist and there are a couple of things necessary for a Advanced consist to be created instead of a UniVersal consist.

1.  The Command station option switch 17 must be set to Thrown (factory default).

2.   The decoders must be status edited to indicated that they support Advanced consisting (also referred to as decoder assisted consisting).  On a DT402 throttle this is indicated by a status of *128 or *28.

3.   You must enter a short address as the TOP address for the consist on the Right Hand throttle knob.

If these requirements are met, then CV19 is set to the consist address in each locomotive that is added to the consist.

This is not new function but has been the case since the DCS100 first came out.  I do not know if this works on an Empire builder system of a Zephyr, but I have confirmed it on my Chief (DCS100).

Regards,

Dale Gloer

Hmmm

What happened to "Setup Consist" ... or "Add" and then typing in the loco number to add a loco to a consist? When I look at my NCE Throttle, that's what I see and to make a CV19 consist, I press those clearly labeled obvious buttons and then the system prompts me for the loco number. No command station switches to set or key sequences I need to look up in the manual to remember. Maybe it's possible on Digitrax to do a CV19 consist, but they sure work hard to make it difficult for mere mortals.

NCE consist file

You mentioned in the NCE section loosing the consist file under certain circumstances, such as changing the battery.  In Decoder Pro's NCE specific menu is the "Edit Consist" command.  This opens a window in which the consists can be manipulated, including two buttons in the lower right of the window labeled "Backup" and "Restore".  This creates a backup of the command station's consist file that can be used to restore it should the need arise.

Dale

Interesting that you comment what you did. I presume that you are correct. I've never done it myself. Also, I submitted the text to Dave at Digitrax and got back an eMail that said that what I said is correct.

Reading through your post, I guess you both could be correct. What I did was what Digitrax promotes. What you presented does lead one to believe that they proved command station based advanced consisting. Seems like a lot of complicated stuff to work around.

Thanks for the input.

Joel

I presume you have your tongue in cheek, as the original post was about Digitrax.

I got a real laugh out of it all.

Rick

You are correct, there are ways to store the data externally on many of the systems. I didn't get into that territory.

Thanks for the comments.

Long and short addresses

There some decoders (I do not remember which ones) where if the consist, long and/or short address are the same, the decoder does not run. I.E., CV1 and CV19 are both 34.

One address cancels out the other. For that reason, I always have a different number in CV19,  long and short address.

This may not happen with your specific decoder, but this is something to look for if you are having trouble with 2 digit addresses.

Thomas, DeSoto, TX

Consisting...

I used to worry about consisting, then I started using JMRI and I was able to forget everything I knew and just enjoyed the pleasure of the locomotives doing exactly what I wanted without knowing ANYTHING.  I always used NCE at my club, which wasn't all that bad really, but it was clunky compared to JMRI.  I even used to worry about Digitrax, which is the most awful interface ever designed, but once you hook up a computer to your Digitrax base station, IT JUST WORKS like you think it should have from the beginning.  We even had a couple of Digitrax die hards at our club, and one day I handed them my cell phone and after about 5 minutes they sold their Digitrax wireless throttle on EBay and never looked back. 

Forget all about CVs!  JMRI all the way!