LuLuJo Posted February 19, 2019 Share Posted February 19, 2019 I have a problem in recent weeks new tts decoders with railmaster. The last 3 I have bought ( 2 vent vans and a black 5) will only work if set to address 3. I have tried all 3 with alternative both long and short addresses. But railmaster will not action them for sound or power. Reading the cv's shows the address has been altered. I have added other different types of decoder without problem. So apart from binning them and not buying any more I am at a loss. The layout is a largish one with 50+ locos and 75 points. I run Railmaster pro with 2 elinks. Controller A for power and B for points. This works fine. I tried a different elink as controller A but it made no difference. Controller A has two power districtsto spread the load. All power supplies are 4 amp. The layout has a wide variety of decoders including some older TTS ones which are still working. Resetting either by factory reset or changing the cv back to 3 and the new TTS deoders work. reset them to any other address and they dont Is there a limit to the numbers of locos tht can run under railmaster? Is this possibly a powwer upply issue? Any ideas Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
96RAF Posted February 19, 2019 Share Posted February 19, 2019 Folk have mentioned in the past there is an apparent limit to the number of locos you can have and they have grouped them to get round this. You appear to have enough power and presumably the second power district you mention is booster driven. I have 4 vent vans and never had any problems either addressing them to short or long address or operating them direct or via RM programs. Of interest will the vans program if you turn them round end for end on the programming track. Hopefully someone who was involved with the max loco thing will be along soon to comment. I am sure if you want to bin the TTS decoders there will be a crowd of volunteers to take them off your hamds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuLuJo Posted February 20, 2019 Author Share Posted February 20, 2019 I am not impressed with this to say the least. This is a problem apparently known about for years but not disclosed or resolved. So the publicity that you can have a large layout with hundreds of locos is in my view false. I know I am lucky to be in the position to have collected a biggish fleet but its very frustrating to think that I face reducing it or changing control sysytem. Of course you dont run a large number of locos at any one time but I do have them on the layout and need to control them in turn. There is apparently a maximum limit of 64 locos you can control. You can list as many as you like but only control that number and its the top 64 on the list. Vent vans count as one in the list. .A work around is supposedly to set up different groups but there are major problems. You cant swap from one group to another without stopping every loco and every sound. So in practice you are limited to having only 60 locos on your layout unless you are preapred to go and physically move locos off the layout if they are in the way and not in your group. I also find that the smaller groups with locos at the bottom of the list dont work either. Seems pretty foolish to me for Hornby to to have a system which limits the number of locos you can run. I will be cancelling this years pre orders from Hornby. I will also ask around on the web forums and facebook groups in the hope someone has solved the problem and to alert others to the issue Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuLuJo Posted February 20, 2019 Author Share Posted February 20, 2019 I have finally found burried in the forum an acceptable solution to this bug in the software. The key is not about setting up groups as such but to ensure that when the software is loaded a small group under 64 locos is loaded and not one over 64 locos. If you then load up on starting again with a small group loaded initially you can switch to the all group and all the locos will work. There are currently 76 in this group on my system and all functioned If you forget and shut down with the all or other large group loaded then starting next time you have to switch to a small group then disconnect the elink. Reconnect it and wait for it to intialise. Then switch to the all group and all the locos should work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.