ZTC Control decoders & Railmaster/Elite

[Trainman1974]

Hi there,

I was wondering if someone could give me advice.

I have a loco which has a ZTC Control Ltd decoder and when I just use the Elite controller on its own the train runs around normally but when I try to control the train through Railmaster attached to my Elite the train has quick bursts of power and then stops and that continues unitl I stop the train.

 

Any ideas of whay it does this?

[Chrissaf]

The Elite provides basic DCC control of the loco. RailMaster adds an extra level of control, such as:

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Configured 'Cruise' and 'Shunt' speed pre-sets.

Scale Speed configuration.

And various other bits of control tweaking to add realism.

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It sounds as if this ZTC Control Ltd decoder has not yet been official profiled by HRMS (RailMaster Software Developers) and added to RailMaster. Or has not been correctly detected as the installed decoder when the loco was added to the loco roster. To check if it has been profiled and/or added correctly.

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Open the 'Locomotive Settings' screen.

Select your loco in the loco list so that all the fields on the screen populate.

Click the " i " icon to open the CV read/write screen shown below:

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I suggest limiting the CV's to read range (top right corner) to read from CV1 to CV15 then click the Green Tick (bottom right) to read this restricted range.

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You are interested in the entries read for CV7 & CV8

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These should ideally indicate the ZTC decoder you know you have fitted.

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If not, then (this is where my knowledge is a little bit flaky) you should be able to force the CV7 entry to show your decoder (if it is actually in the database) by either double clicking CV7** or right clicking it.

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Note** not 100% sure, but I think you double or right click the 'Value' column entry.

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You should see a pull down list appear that allows you to manually select the decoder (If listed) that you want to use the inbuilt RailMaster profiling for.

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If your decoder is listed, then select it and then 'save your settings' to the selected Loco. Using the 'Pen' icon bottom left.

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Then test again to see if any improvement.

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If your decoder is not listed then there is a procedure where you send the PDF manual for the decoder to HRMS via email and ask them to add it.

 

[Trainman1974]

thanks for the advice, but i've decided to swap the decoder over to one that i know is compatible with the Railmaster software and the Elink/Elite controller.

 

David.

[96RAF]

ZTC decoders have been around for some considerable time, so I would have thought them NMRA compliant and thus compatible with Elite (NMRA warranted) when used in conjunction with RM.

 

I have several ZTC decoders which have been tested as satisfactory with Elite but I have never tried them with RM. Of interest which model was your ZTC decoder, in case I have one.

 

Something you could have tried was to toggle Scale Speed in RM to see if having it turned on or off made any difference. Too late now as you have swapped the decoder out.