Before te weekend's ops session, I installed swivel picture hangers to attach lanyards to several of my NCE throttles. Two were Cab-04r with the stubby external antenna. The other was a Cab-06r with the internal antenna.
The -04rs worked well and people found the lanyard convenient. The -06r seemed to fail! It would not pick up a signal and hold it. I finally reset it to factory specs by entering cab address 00 and reprogramming it to address 28 (from 25). Then it barely worked. We gave up on it.
After more troubleshooting, I changed back the only thing I'd changed with it from before the failure -- I removed the D-shaped swivel hanger I installed at the bottom of the case (the antenna is secreted at the top.) It started working right away!
So if you run into something similar, this could be an issue. Now to look for a tough plastic swivel loop...
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
That's really a strange outcome -- the metal lanyard clip should not have been close enough to the throttle's internal antenna to cause such a signal loss, unless some of the throttle's circuit board traces that feed the antenna are near the bottom of the throttle, or the lanyard clip was somehow draining the antenna's emissions.
Only way this could have any effect on the radio is if the hole was drilled through a portion of the circuit, or possibly touching part of the board when assembled.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
Randy,
That's the way it would initially seem, but I was darn carefull to drill the holes so they didn't interfere with any internal components.I'm positive nothing was touching or damaged by the lanyard ring install.
I used to do a lot of radio monitoring as a hobby, though, and this is not as strange as it may seem. If the ring was resonant at or even near the freqs the base and the remote use to talk to each other and depending on the nature of the proximity to the antenna, it can do this. I know these devices use very low power transmissions and I think it's not a conventional FM signal, either. And I have no experience with planar antennas.
Yeah but the Cab-04R and Cab-06R all use the same radio frequency, unless this one lanyard ring was different from the others, they all would have a resonance problem. Did this one have a different lanyard, one that migth have been conductive, instead of insulating, which could have coupled the RF into the body of whoever was holding it. POSSIBLY the -06R antenna is 90 degrees relative to the -04R's antenna, when hed in the normal operating position, but I'd think that despite the differences, the basic shape of the cases would dictate the circuit board being in one particular orientation.
Definitely different antennas, aware they're the same freqs. The 04r antennas are conventional stubby ones. The planar antenna is also what's called a fractal antenna IIRC. It's oriented vertically, but is a flat form-factor and inside the case.. The swivel loop was the same on all three controllers.
The fact that the 04r and its different antenna had no issues is also unsurprising. These things tend to be unique to particular combinations of antennas, while seemingly related combinations display no issues.