High Pitched Hum

[Bob Lounsbury]

I have a moderately large layout of n scale Kato Unitrack.  I’m using an NCE Power Pro 5 system.  Everything works great, but there is an annoying high-pitched hum, which seems to be coming from the turnouts.  Switching a turnout makes no change in the noise.  The turnout switches are powered by a Kato power pack not the NCE system.  Even so, the noise only happens when the NCE system is on.  The folks at NCE felt it was a Unitrack issue.  Haven’t heard back from Kato yet—unsure if I will or if they’ll just say it’s an NCE issue.

 

Anyone else have this problem or heard of anyone having it?  Any ideas how to eliminate it?

 

Thanks

 

Bob

[Anonymous]

are the turnouts controlled by dcc or by a switch board? If it's dcc, then you might want to try a different brand of trackside decoder

[richg1998]

LAX1DUDE

are the turnouts controlled by dcc or by a switch board? If it's dcc, then you might want to try a different brand of trackside decoder

 

Read his post. Controlled by Kato power pack.

Rich

[richg1998]

I assume these are twin coil machines.

Have you got a turnout you can try on the work bench?

That is a strange one right now.

Rich

[rrinker]

A short can make a high pitched sizzling sound, it's one way to track down a short in a DCC system. If it's just some poor contact causing the short, it might not draw enough to trip the breaker.

                             --Randy