I bought this unit in Feb. this year, hasn't been run very much.. but when I put it on the track today and selected it with my DT 400r I gave it a touch on the throttle and it almost moved but somehow it is shorting out. It's HO scale DCC with sound. When this happened the Zephyr's display did it's dance indicating a short. I immediately backed off the one notch on the throttle and the 'short' went away. At the work bench I checked for anything unusual about the wheels and trucks (foreign objects etc) but could not see anything out of the ordinary. Placing the unit back on the tracks I tried it again and this time the loco took off like a scalded dog, with a speed setting on the radio throttle of ONE. Backing off to zero the loco came to a complete stop but repeated that behavior when barely budging the throttle knob. For the next few tries it did not do this, it simply 'shorts' out, sound cuts out, lights go out, Zephry display goes wild... until the throttle is backed off that one notch then the sound comes back on as if it's cranking up for the first time.
I tried doing a manual reset of the decoder by lifting one sides wheels off the track while keeping the opposite side in contact. That didn't help. Sound and lights function as normal.
This sounds like a wire is touching something it's not supposed to touch instead of a decoder problem. I've thought about doing a reset of the decoder back to factory settings but something tells me that's not the problem.
Any thoughts?
thanks,
Jarrell
Wires are held onto the decoder and trucks by small plastic clips that can easily be jarred loose and allow a wire to short against an adjacent connection.
Remove the shell and solder all wire connections.
Thanks for the reply Cacole. The wires on the decoder should be easy enough for me to check and maybe even solder. If it's the connection down on the trucks I think it'll be going back to Athearn.