Deleting Prodigy programmed DCC address and converting to Digitrax

[IronOre]

Our railroad club has a mixture of home users with Prodigy and Digitrax. Our layout has Digitrax, but several members are having trouble deleting a Prodigy address to open up the decoder to program in a Digitrax address. Any expert who can help?

Thanks,

Jerry,

Radcliff, Ky

[jalajoie]

I don't fully understand the question. I am only guessing, but if you are talking about an Advance Consist address, the only way to clear it is in setting CV19=0.

[ruderunner]

I'm not sure why one even needs to change addresses.  If a loco is programmed for a certain address on one system then, transferred to another the address doesn't change.  The second system should be able to acquire the loco and control it.  If the home users don't exit a consist before going to the club, that is user error not system error.  If you have multiple locos with the same road number/address at the club then that may pose a problem unless someone is willing to change their home user address.

[tstage]

Jerry,

You shouldn't have to change the address at all.  I use NCE at home but have used Digitrax over at a friend's house with no problems running my locomotives.  Once addressed, a DCC system should be able to read (and accept) the address given to it.

The only scenario that I can think where it might not work is if it's an old DCC system that can only read 2-digit addresses and the decoder is set to a 4-digit address.

Tom

[rrinker]

 DOn't forget the overlap in long/short addressing.

With Digitrax, any address from 1-127 is always a short address. Also known as a 2-digit address - because the NMRA spec says 2 HEX digits, 8 bits, not 2 decimal digits. Thus the decimal numbers from 0-255 can be represented. 0 is reserved for running a DC loco, and one bit out of the address byte is used for somethign else, leaving you with 1-127 as valid short addresses. 128+ are long addresses for Digitrax

Lenz uses 1-99 as short addresses, 100+ are all long addresses (4 digit). Leftover from the pre-NMRA DCC Lenz system which could only address up to 99.

 With NCE, 1-127 can be EITHER short or long addresses depending on how you program them. Thus you can have a Loco 25 on an NCE system that will not run on a Lenz or Digitrax system. You cna have a loco 120 that works on Digitrax or NCE but not Lenz.

This is a pet peeve of mine with the NMRA standards. Instead of making a single requirement, they allowed all of these methods to be valid. Standards are great, but standards that allow 3 different interpretations with all 3 being correct are pretty worthless.

                                        --Randy