Alright, I've done more testing, and I have some good news.
I disconnected the wires from the motor, and installed an NCE decoder for motor control. I can now confirm that:
-The motor will indeed run much faster with a different decoder installed
-The MTH decoder will still make noises based on the tachometer speed even without the original decoder connected to the motor
-It is not necessary to connect a resistor to the original motor leads
All in all, I'm pretty happy with those results. Now I just have to repair a couple broken lighting wires...
Shades_10318 Alright, I've done more testing, and I have some good news. I disconnected the wires from the motor, and installed an NCE decoder for motor control. I can now confirm that: -The motor will indeed run much faster with a different decoder installed -The MTH decoder will still make noises based on the tachometer speed even without the original decoder connected to the motor -It is not necessary to connect a resistor to the original motor leads All in all, I'm pretty happy with those results. Now I just have to repair a couple broken lighting wires...
Pretty close to what I recommended.......
Sheldon
Quite an involved discussion/process. Surely things to learn if you are an 'electronics type'.
Bottom line for me,...the reason I would never buy MTH locomotives.
(but somehow I have ended up with a couple of them I hope to not hace many problems with in the future)
Brian
My Layout Plan
Interesting new Plan Consideration
As long as you only run them with other MTH locos. And don't have dirty spots, if running multiple units...
I have the FA/FB set. Both are powered and both have their own sound decoders. SO it does sound pretty nice with the two of them going, even if they are completely in sync, since MTH does not have, or at least it is not accessible from DCC, an option like ESU has to slighty adjust the sync of the prime mover sound so in a lashup of 4 locos, they all can be a beat or so off one another. But their default behavior which also seems to not be changeable, is to come up silent, even if they previously were running. This isn't a problem at home, but the club layout has the older modules using fitter track between them, which due to worn out rail joiners make for some significant dead sections. It's why every train needs a relatively large seam loco with loco and tender all wheel pickup, or double headed diesels - so one can push the other when it stalls. Every once in a while, fresh joiners are used, and the layout works great for that show. With the MTH locos, if one of them momentaril stalls over the dead spot, it goes silent. Then you have to hit F4 to start the sound back up. Except if the other one did not stall and has the sound still working - F4 shuts it off! Very annoying.
The other useless thing is the remote uncoupler. Dropping off the train is no problem. It's coupling back up. You have to slam into the train like it was some cheap toy. Thankfully they provide a set of regular Kadees in the box to swap them out.
Also I guess they didn't want to bother paying for them like Scaletrains and Rapido, but they have working class lights - which can be off, red, or green. That's it. Between Loksound's function control capability and a little extra hardware, Rapido and Scaletrains have managed to make theirs cycle between off, red, green, and white so you get the two most common options plus the others.
As for this working with this Allegheny - the NCE decoders don't have BEMF, so there is no part of the total DCC voltage 'reserved' at the top end, at full throttle, the motor gets whatever there is, so it should be able to spin a little faster.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
For what it's worth, the MTH Allegheny at least has a stay-alive capacitor installed from the factory, it will start up with the sound on if that was the state it was in last time, and you can re-map the function keys so that F8 turns the sound on or off. So it would seem that they've at least made a few improvements in that area. I do agree that the programming options on the decoder are still pretty limited, though.