Well, I finally finished my main electrical wiring with my bus line and feeders. To this layout I was running my Digitrax Zenith and had no real complaints, except when I would opt to run a DC engine it seemed to run quite slow on the layout. As I have a number of DC engines that I will never upgrade all of them to DCC having a DCC system like the Digitrax Zenith was essential.
I finally added a Digitrax 5 amp booster to the layout and keeping the Zenith as the main controller I find that changing DCC addresses and values on my programing track is much faster and less errors than before. All of my engines DC and DCC are running a bit faster now, especially the old brass DC engines.
If only I had upgraded my system when I received my Digitrax booster and a 402 throttle, I would have enjoyed running my layout sooner with the upgrade instead of waiting until I finished all my wiring.
Umm Don that's ZEPHYR isn't it?
Joe
Yep, depending on the setting you have chosen, the booster has a higher voltage. I also use my Zephyr as the command station to a booster. I have kept the Zephyr as the booster for my main yard however.
Simon Modelling CB&Q and Wabash See my slowly evolving layout on my picturetrail site http://www.picturetrail.com/simontrains and our videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/MrCrispybake?feature=mhum
Same setup I have, although I was never disappointd int he speed out fo the Zephyr by itself - I try to maintain prototypical speeds and on the branch line I model they weren't very high, regardless of what a given loco was capable of. The difference being the Zephyr is fixed at 12V output while the DB150 and DCS100 have a selectable output voltage of about 12V for N, 15V for HO, and 18V for O/G. Hopefully you have the toggle switch set ont he HO position if you are runnign HO, they'll go much faster on the O/G setting but that's really too much voltage for typical HO motors (actual voltage to the motor is somewhat lower than the track voltage after the diode drops of the decoder's motor driver circuitry).
My layotu will not support more than 10 trains running, it won;t even support 10, so I left the Zephyr as the command station, and power the track fromt he DB150. Unlike SImon, my Zephyr output doesn;t go to the track, it run my stationary decoders, Witht he new Zephyr Xtra I'd have a hard time justifying a DCS100 command station even on my planned 'ultimate' layout. Put it this way, even on our club modular layout that can be as large as 28x132 feet when all pieces are used, we rarely have more than 6 trains running, maybe 8 tops.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.