In my update http://www.railpage.com.au/f-t10436-s125.htm I mentioned how much I am just running trains now, and putting decoders into locos. Well I hit some problems with some Auscision's N class loco
I'm sing TCS DP2x-UK decoders, and in one the lights did not work. reseating the decodfer a few times made this fault go away. A loose socket ?
In another, a friends B calss the loco would not work, so we tried it on te program track ( NCE 5 amp power pro ) putting it on the track , the loco moved. I tried another decoder of the same type, then a NCE one - the loco did the same thing. The loco moved steadily, not in fits as soon as the the programming track option was entered. The loco was retested on DC and found it working as it should. We have decided to take it back to see if there is a faul.
Have anyone see these faults?
Regards,
David Head
G'day David,
Sorry to read of your woes mate!!
Whilst I haven't struck those exact issues, I have now reached the stage where I fit all my locos with sound decoders. Although some of the models (eg: Trainorama diesels) have the capacity to plug a sound decoder directly into the factory board, I usually choose to totally remove the factory board and hardwire the new decoder (Tsunami usually) directly to the loco. One exception to this was the recent Auscision 422 locos, into which I have installed the ESU decoders from DCCSound.com
I guess my take on it is that sometimes these electronic gizmos (ie: factory boards and aftermarket decoders) don't want to talk to each other for reasons known only to the gizmos themselves. Having said that, my limited knowledge of TCS decoders is that they are very well made and work beautifully. If I had to lay a bet, I would be betting that the fault/s lay within the factory board and not the TCS. However, I have also learnt early in the piece that decoders put out by companies that don't specialise in decoders (eg: MRC, NCE, Digitrax etc) tend to have a poor track record when compared to those made by specialist decoder makers (eg: Tsunami, Loksound and TCS etc).
By all means, take the loco and/or the decoder back to the place of purchase and see if they can fix/replace it/them.
Cheers
Roachie