I belong to a club where members bring in a wide assortment of motive power with their attendant decoders. Some of the Proto 2000 locomotives with sound can't be read by our Digitrax system. We tried a Powerpax booster and were able to read CV's into Decoder Pro. So it looks like we are going to have to buy a Program Tarck Booster. I did some searching on here and read some posts about the Powerpax booster. My question is: What are the popular program Track Boosters out there? Are some better than others? What do we have to look out for with one brand over another? Thanks in advance.
i had to program my sound decoder on the mainline.it would not program on the programming track.might want to try it
Yes, it will program fine on the mainline. However, being in a club that has an Open House events periodically, it is impractical to shut down the main to program a locomotive. If there are other locomotives on the main, it interferes with the programming and the other locomotives have to be isolated or removed from the layout. During an Open House event, we unfortunately have no choice but to use the Programming Track.
There is no reason to isolate other locomotives when doing ops mode programming ("programming on the main"). You do want to make sure that whoever is doing the programming knows what they are doing, because if you select address '0' or you go into ops mode programming without any address selected, it will usse the broadcast address and program all of the locomotives. If you select the address of the locomotive you want to program, then it will only program that locomotive.
My DCC H0 scale club has this same issue with Proto 2000 and sound (and newer Athearn Genesis with sound). We are using Easy DCC. Sounds like it must be a programming track issue. Most members program at home on their own DCC system. It is a problem for those members with no DCC at home.
My PowerPax died after less than a week. Called and e-mailed DCC Specialties and have never heard back from them. You are better off going with the Soundtraxx unit. It is much more reliable than the PowerPax, and it does not alwyas need a wall wart since it can also run off the track A/B outputs of the controller.
The only two that I know of are the Power Pax unit from DCC specialties and the PTB-100 from Soundtraxx. The Power Pax comes in a small enclosure and with a power supply. The PTB 100 is just a PC board with wires and will run off you buss line. I would suggest that you put the PTB 100 in some type of enclosure if you happen to use it.
Even though logic and the operators manual both say the same thing as you do, in practice is hasn't worked out that way for us. It depends on the locomotive. Some seem to work fine but others won't program on the main if there is another locomotive on the same block. Wiring issues? ... Maybe. Hehe, I just knew the our tireless NCE booster would say that but hey, Gary, I anticipated you . We actually tried it out on an NCE system with a ProCab (the radio enabled one) and it would not read either. In fact it would not read with the PowerPax either. Here is the setup. A laptop with JMRI's DecoderPro installed on it was hooked to the NCE command station's serial port. In between the Programming track and the Command Station we installed a PowerPax Program Track Booster. P2K GP7's with sound as well as a couple of Athearn Genesis sound equipped SD60M's were tried. Neither model would read After much Googling, we found that for the P2k sound enabled locos (QSI sound), we had to use a 12 Ohm 1 Watt resistor in series with the PowerPax to get DecoderPro to read the CV's. Once this resistor was placed in line with the PowerPax and the Programming Track everything worked fine. Apparently, sound equipped locos require more current, to program and read, than most DCC systems can provide.
Thanks for the reply David and woodone. I assume the Soundtraxx unit will work with all other brands of decoder also?
Yes it will. Both products work with any decoders, but for sound, the capacitor needs to be fully charged, and that is what both of these units do.
Thank You David. I wonder if you or anyone else could answer another question for me. I was looking at the specifications for the Digitrax PR3 programmer and I notice that they say that no booster is required. I suppose that this is only for Digitrax decoders and that I will have the same problems with third party sound decoders if I don't have a Program Track Booster. I understand that I will have to have a PR3 if I want to interface our Digitrax system with a PC and upload sounds into a Digitrax sound decoder. I'm just not sure if I will still require a booster to read CV's from sound equipped decoders.
Sounds like a good reason not to use ops programming to me. All you need is one persons to goof it up. It's really tempting Murphy's Law. If it can get screwed up, it will.
I do not know about the PR3 specifically, but it should supply the signal for any NMRA compliant decoder, not just Digitrax. I just can not say for sure what it does with sound decoders. I use the soundtraxx unit and my Loco Buffer USB and JMRI's DecoderPro for all of my programming.
Am I that predictable? Don't confuse a PowerHouse Pro w/ProCab with the PowerCab - different beasts when it comes to programming. The PowerCab puts out around 300mA in programme mode and is self protected. Gives sufficient time to get the power switched off, or the loco removed, before trashing the decoder, or worse. I haven't programmed any sound decoders as yet but I believe there are very few it can't and with the addition of the USB interface you can use DecoderPro as well. Just a thought...
That is exactly what happened to us. During our last open house one of our members tried to program a sound equipped loco on the main as he couldn't get it to respond on the programming track. He shut the whole layout down. It took a while to figure out what he did and recover from it. Embarassing to say the least. We now have a "no programming on the main" rule during an open house. Gary, I am not very familiar with NCE's systems, so I emailed the guy who has the NCE system we used. This is what he said: "The system I have is the Power House Pro radio 5amp". This would not read back CV's on the programming track when used with some of the sound equipped locomotives. This was even with the PowerPax programmer hooked up. We had to use a 12 Ohm resistor in series with the PowerPax before it would read CV's.
Just an update. We ordered and installed a Soundtraxx PTB-100 programming Track Booster and it worked flawlessly with our sound equipped locomotives. The same locomotive that required a PowerPax and a 12 Ohm resistor in series showed no problems reading back with just the PTB100 installed. Thanks to all those who answered my questions.
