dead Broadway


Aerojet

Aerojet

Active Member
Somethings I do not get. I have a Broadway Pacific HO scale DCC and sound unit. It is dead. Period. I tried putting on the program track and I do have the amplifier for some locos spliced into the thing, and -- nothing.

It sits there and says it is responding, but nothing is going on except the headlight in on. I can't turn it off or on, it just stays on.

What gives?

Did the DCC decoder die? Or is there is deeper problem.

If you need to ask. I was working one day, and it was put onto a "dead" storage track, one which I can turn the power on and off to park locos, and the next time I tried to activate the thing, nothing. i put it out on the main and tried again. Nothing.

I guess the age of steam in over on my pike, whether I like it or not.

Ideas?

Thanks,

The Aerojet
 
It wasn't left in a consist number was it? i.e. you forgot to kill the consist before turning the track power off. CV19=0 will fix that. I nothing else works, you may have to do a reset to decoder default CV8=8 to bring it back to default address 3 and start over again. IIRC Broadway use horn sounds to indicate when a CV confirms a value change.
 
Do a hard reset per the Paragon decoder protocol, but be doubly sure to remove track power right after pressing 'enter'. When you restore track power, acquire Add 03 and the decoder will respond...IF it ain't broke.

One last ditch effort: Out on the main, and with your system in "Ops Mode", or programming on the main, acquire Add 00 and do the restore again. Remove track power and restore power once again. If still no go, you have a defective decoder.
 
Thanks! After a bit of screwing around I finally got it to do something. Reset at last, now it is working on ad 03. Which for now I will leave it as is where is as it will be the only loco with that address.

It is great hearing the thing chugging along again. Not sure what screwed it up - but it works now. This was also the loco that had the run away problem. When I cancelled the loco number and put something else up on the DCC the new one would work -- no problem -- then when still on powered track the Pacific would suddenly power up and head out the siding it was parked on at full power. Only was to usually stop it was to shut off track power and hope it would not shoot out again on it own. Nother problem i never fixed.

Thanks,

The Aerojet
 
That is a problem with dual-mode decoders, which all modern decoders are. They sense DC current if that's what you are using to power the rails, and they'll respond to DC throttle inputs, but minimized since there's no digital signal imprinted on DC current. The way to get around that is to change the value in CV29 to have all the same parameters as before, or the new set that you desire...MINUS...the ability to act when DC current is supplied to the rails. By removing this sensitivity, when you power up DCC rails (which always have full scale voltage to them in DCC), the decoder cannot mistake the inrush of DCC current as DC current and ramp up the drive mechanism from 'zero-to-sixty' inside of a second.

Try this calculator here:

http://www.digitrax.com/support/cv/calculators/
 
I had that runaway response once, and that was a BLI AC6000, the first DCC/sound loco I bought as I remember, when it was first put onto a DCC track. It took me a little while to adopt the practice of "locking out" the dual capability in all of my DCC decoders as a policy.
 
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