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Memory loss on short circuit

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  • Member since
    October 2006
  • From: Texas
  • 2,934 posts
Posted by C&O Fan on Thursday, February 7, 2008 5:20 PM
 locoi1sa wrote:

  Hi Terry

 Joe said the same I was going to. Good advise with short management. The other thing is what make decoder? Does it go to factory reset or just scrambles some CVs? I had a low end decoder that would lose its address only when a short happened. That went in the trash for a better decoder.

    Pete
 

It's a QSI sound decoder factory installed

It completly resets to all factory defaults

 

Come to think of it it's the only QSI decoder on the layout

the others have different brands of decoders

TerryinTexas

See my Web Site Here

http://conewriversubdivision.yolasite.com/

 

 

  • Member since
    July 2006
  • 3,312 posts
Posted by locoi1sa on Thursday, February 7, 2008 5:00 PM

  Hi Terry

 Joe said the same I was going to. Good advise with short management. The other thing is what make decoder? Does it go to factory reset or just scrambles some CVs? I had a low end decoder that would lose its address only when a short happened. That went in the trash for a better decoder.

    Pete
 

 I pray every day I break even, Cause I can really use the money!

 I started with nothing and still have most of it left!

  • Member since
    January 2002
  • From: Portland, OR
  • 3,119 posts
Posted by jfugate on Thursday, February 7, 2008 12:14 PM

Yes, this is DCC's dirty little secret: shorts.

Shorts scramble decoder settings, and once in a while, will even blow the decoder. Officially, this should not happen, but reality is it does happen -- not super often but often enough to be really annoying. A short is a catastrophic event to a decoder and the more you do to avoid shorts on a DCC layout, the better.

That's why I talk about DCC short management here in this video. Using auto tail light bulbs as shown turns the short into a non-event and your decoder programming stays intact.

I've installed this kind of short management on my HO Siskiyou Line in 2000. Once I did that, scrambled decoders from shorts became history. My loco decoders rarely ever have an issue now and if they do, I immediately know its a bad decoder.

The other good news with this kind of short management is people hardly even notice now when someone gets a short because only the guy with the short stops running. Once the short is removed, the guy's train will start running again and the decoders are always fine.

For about $1 per train block, this is really cheap insurance and it makes running trains on a DCC layout a real pleasure -- shorts are no longer a big deal. 

Joe Fugate Modeling the 1980s SP Siskiyou Line in southern Oregon

  • Member since
    October 2006
  • From: Texas
  • 2,934 posts
Memory loss on short circuit
Posted by C&O Fan on Thursday, February 7, 2008 9:46 AM

When I run my atlas gp-9 on my friends layout and a short circuit occurs on the layout 

The Loco resets it's self to factory default yet none of the other locos do this

Any ideas why this happens

TerryinTexas

See my Web Site Here

http://conewriversubdivision.yolasite.com/

 

 

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