I'll recount my experiences here. Pick & choose solutions. My DCC set up wants squeaky clean rail & wheels to function at all. Throw in my mix of locos/manufacture dates/manufactures, and it gets messier. All my TOs are insulfrogs....I believe all "DCC compatible" TOs are thus. I have one curved TO with a 3 inch long non-powered frog. Only one of my locos can deal with that. The pickups on the other 4 are too close together to span that dead frog. I do have a "frog juicer" (not yet installed) that I think can deal with that.......but. I also have one loco which has a single axle pickup which stops (at slow speeds) at every TO. The fix there solves my problems.....except for dirty track. TCS decoders with "keep alive" technology turns that single axle pickup loco into a sweet runner....even when the track is not spotless. Those decoders are more expensive than most....bout 25-30 bucks extra. TCS also sells an "add -on" keep alive for other decoders....I have no experience with those.....but plan to find out!!
I use capacitors in my N scale engine because my small switching layout has unpowered frogs. The capacitors are just like TCS's "keep alive" except you have to find the negative to solder in to. More DCC decoders should come with an explanation as to where to tap in to. Also the Frog Juicers make it easy to turn the frog live. They detect the correct phase or polarity and quickly switch to it once any of the wheels from the engine touches the frog. I was thinking of buying one and hooking it up to all three turnouts on the switching layout because there is no way that the engine would ever contact more than one frog anyway.
