Hi Guys
This is my first time writing something in this forum (silent reader for some years now) and would like to say hello to everybody.
I am a big fan of the US and Canada and their railroads and am modeling BC Rail in the late 80s to the 90s and started to upgrade my fleet of Overland GF6Cs to DCC. I have a lot of experience in DCC conversions on regular pastic models from the time when I was doing european modeling. Bus as I habe seen brass models, especially OMI are pretty new to me.
I started upgrading an OMI Dash 9-44CWL from Overland which I bought on ebay: as I have seen there are some very low voltage lamps with a neat little electronics to insure a decent lighting in DC operations. I experimented a bit and after I built in a resistor into the lamp ciruit I amd pretty happy with the result (1000Ohm).
Now as I have started on the GF6C I saw that these are much more sofisticated and I wanted to ask if someone has experiance with newer OMI Models and their lamps: what voltage/power to they need so I can calculate the proper resistor necessary to complete the upgrade.
Thank you for your help!!!
PS: I am from switzerland so english is not my native language: I started learning english by reading a lot of SciFi books and watching cartoons, so I have to ask for forgiveness for incorrect sentences or bad choices of words.
Your English is better than our Swiss and you probably have a couple other languages up your sleeve.
When we use the word 'lamp' we mean the light bulb like Thomas Edison invented. You might mean LED, but I think you mean lamp, with your reference to DC products.
Most of what I see in this form about ditch lights, number boards are people installing LED's of various sizes. I don't know why a brass loco should be different than plastic with regard to lighting because both are going to need a DCC decoder
Our Canadian members would be more familiar with that loco and its lights than us gringos.
https://www.trainmaster.ch/ZX-105.htm
Henry
COB Potomac & Northern
Shenandoah Valley
Thank you for your quick answer and yes I mean lamp: I first tested them with very low voltage tester (1.5V) I use to determine the polarity in case there are LEDs in the. They only glimmed slightly and they worked both ways, so definitly no LEDs.
Overland doesn't use just resistors, they use a LM317 regulator to make sure that in DC mode the light starts early and stays with a constant brightness. But because of that the lamps are for low voltage only (the ones in the Dash 9 worked well with a 1000Ohm resistor directly from the decoder). But because the wiring and also the lamps in this much newer Overland Model are different (probably with slightly higher voltage lamps) I wanted to see if someone in this community might know what voltage these lamps are made for.
PS: You actually found the link to the exact loco I have gotten on my table right know. :)
CursatorOverland doesn't use just resistors, they use a LM317 regulator to make sure that in DC mode the light starts early and stays with a constant brightness.
I read all the electrical posts because I am not the guru on electricity. I don't recall a previous discussion of Overland Regulators, but by replying, your post will shuffle to the top and maybe someone can help.