Track and electrical/DCC
How to power Atlas frog?
How have you electrified the Atlas turnouts cast frogs?
Both the Atlas Customline and SuperSwitches have cast frogs that do not take solder. They do have a small tab the guardrail and the tab has a hole. It looks like it is for wire. In the past I have made mechanical connections from underneath, a very short 2-56 screw through a drilled brass strip, then solder to the strip. That is a pain in the neck.
Digitrax decoder question/review
So, I received my first step in my DCC conversion process for my locos over Christmas, and Digitrax Zephyr Xtra. Yay uber wife!
My question is about the decoders I plan on using. I found this one...
SDH166D
...on the Digitrax website, and I've seen it on some other sites for about 43 per unit.
My question, is has anyone used this particular decoder, and if so, what is your opinion on it? Is it a good decoder, or would you rank it as a starter unit to get locos up and running on DCC?
What do I have here?
What is it? There is a long green wire which I think is an antenna. The large chip is a cd4066be and the small on is uln2283b. The large silver object is a speaker. It is installed in a box car. There are no markings on the circuit board. It is powered by a 9 volt battery. I picked it up at a swap meet for free.
NCE PowerCab, unable to get F10 - F12 to work
I'm playing around with manual notching in the PowerCab and the Atlas RS-3 with a LokSound decoder. F9 works fine for notching up but nothing happens when I press Shift-F10 to notch down. According to Atlas' manual, "Both the F9 and F10 function keys MUST be in their Off states before they can be used to trigger either Notch Up (F9 key) or Notch Down (F10 key) sound effects." How do I determine if the F10 key is in its Off state?
help with turnouts
I need to find a turnout that equals a 15" radius curve....problem is that I don't know my turnouts that well..
Cab Extension Plate for MRC Advance2
By any chance does anyone know how to build a wired cab extension plate for an MRC Advance2 system and/or a powered plate?
Steve
Moderator note: Put this post in its own thread for better visibility.
convert brass steam loco with vandi tender to dcc
Hi
I have 3 brass locos and would like to convert them to dcc. Is there an idiots guide to doing this. One of the loco's has a vanderbuilt tender.
Can anyone help please
Quick DCC Decoder advice needed
I have an older (2006) Atlas MP15DC with a factory installed QSI sound decoder whose sound is poor by modern standards. I want to use a newer sound decoder and mount it under the table to external speakers. Mounting under the table and connecting to the external speaker is easy.
My question is, what would you do regarding the old decoder?
1) Keep it in the loco and clip the speaker wires?
DPDT switch
I intend now to have a reversing loop [N gauge and DCC] and enquire if it matters if the switch has a centre off position or not. Advice appreciated. Thanks. Tom
Inside a Tortoise.
I bought 60 "used" Tortoise. 1/3 were wired but only a few of those ever saw a layout, the rest were new. On the ninth one I installed, which was wired but never used I could not get any frog power. I couldn't get any continuity on any combination of terminals fro either of the SPDT. Since I was the second owner I didn't have any warranty so I took it apart to see what had fallen off internally. There were no wipers on the arm that sweeps the PC Board. What do you make of this? Has anybody had this problem? My take is that there no wipers when it was built.
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