Can anyone help me! I have a Digitrax SDH164D sound decoder in a Athearn HO scale SD40-2 blue box locomotive. Every time I run the locomotive and I have the horn going the locomotive slows down. Does anyone know how to fix this problem?
Thanks!!
WHat speaker did you use? It seems to be better if you use MORE than 8 ohms even though they say 8 ohms will work.
ALso try turning off BEMF, that seems to help as well. Set CV57 to 0.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
The speaker is a 8 ohm small oval speaker. I have done some playing withe the cv and I have found that programming CV 57 to 5 works very well.
Ooops. you were right CV57 has to be 0 in order for it to work.
Interesting... I just noticed this issue too. I have several of these in Athearn units and they all do it. Will give this fix a shot tomorrow.
Thanks!
R
You can also find more info on the Digitraxsound Yahoo Group. Lot of helpful peopel there who are workign through these issues and also making these decoders do things that some will say are impossible based on the specs.
I know at least one person used a pair of 8 ohm speakers in series, for a 16 ohm load, and didn't have trouble with the slowdowns. It seems in the attempt to make an off the shelf chip do all this, it's just a tad overloaded trying to calculate BEMF and play multiple sounds at the same time. If you have the room, any old motor decoder plus a Soundbug would get you the same sounds and programmability without the motor control issues.
Yeah, unfortunately I went for these because they are the only thing I could find that would fit into an Athearn F59PHI. All the weight athearn has in there, they don't take sound decoders too well.
But the workaround fixed the slowdown problem. Thank you very much to the folks who figured that fix out. Made my morning!
(here's one in an AC4400) http://youtu.be/ZWXWg8OXWBI
Best,
Rob