I have one of the above installed in an n scale motorlesschassis, the idea being to run it in a consist with powered engines, the installationwas done for me some time ago. The decoder is installed on the chassis withonly the red and black track power wires connected (the others have beenremoved). I have a Digitrax DCC system but cannot program the decoder, I get 'No Pg'message each time. When I place the chassis on the track the sound is active immediately but notcontrollable. I have heard that I may need to have the orange and grey motor wiresconnected to a motor in order to program (I would have to solder these on). Doesanyone think that would make sense in this case? Thanks
It is a common misconception that you do need a load on the motor outputs to program a decoder, but it's not true; however, you do usually need a load for the command station to see the acknowledgement that the programming took or for decoder read back. If you are trying to program a 4 digit address, it actually takes three writes to program, and if the command does not see the acknowledgement for the first write it may not do the others. There are two solutions to this(other than adding a load) - calculate the values for CV17, CV18, and CV29 and program them individually, or use Ops mode programming(ops mode does not look for the decoder acknowledgement).
Decoder Connect a 100 ohm, 1/2 watt resistor across the motor leads to simulate a motor. I and others have done this. The only downside is the decoder will not see any inductive effect, BEMF, from the resistor like it would if using a motor. It might be noticeable with a sound decoder. Below is a link to an excellant DCC site. Read what he says about adding a resistor. http://www.mrdccu.com/curriculum/soundtraxx/tsunami.htm Rich
If you are going to attach this motorless chassis to a locomotive, you probably want both programmed to the same loco number. Put both on the program track and you will get the read back. Most CV's for sound control are different than non sound decoders so only the sound decoder will be changed. If you program the non sound decoder, any changes to the sound decoder probably won't matter. You may also want to disable BEMF for the sound decoder as suggested in the manual. Harold
Thanks all for totally demystifying this, both the resistor solution and programing a motor chassis next to the sound chassis worked great.
