Another Stay Alive Discussion

[rpjallan]

Hi Everyone.

I was asked a question last night by a very experienced DC modeller, who has just started to build a DCC layout, about using (and making his own) stay alives. I said I would send him some links from this forum as there were many discussions with some very good diagrams here. Having said that, all the diagrams I was referring to seem to have gone missing during the recent forum upgrade. As far as I remember it was Chrissaf who provided most of these. I think it would be very useful if a new topic could be started that includes all this information if it is still available and made a "sticky" even.

It's a pity a bit more care with this sort of thing wasn't taken when the forum upgrade was done. Anyway, thanks in advance if any of this can be achieved.

[96RAF]

Pending any more expansive reply by Chris or others, this site shows how to make stay alives and where to install them on Hornby decoders.

https://www.strathpefferjunction.com/adding-a-stay-alive-capacitor-to-a-hornby-tts-sound-decoder/

Other decoder manufacturers e.g. ESU post information as to where to connect to their decoders.

Note that some stay alives are two wire and some three wire, this extra wire to monitor the charging circuit, which may or may not be on board the decoder, so all is not as simple as first seen.

[Chrissaf]

Seems to me a reasonable request.

I will write a new generic 'Stay Alive' guide in the form of a FAQ tutorial.

Expect to see something appear later this week.

Fortunately, this is one of the few 'How To' topics I have produced historically on this forum where I have kept a local copy of the original imagery. So the production of a new FAQ tutorial is not a significantly onerous task to perform.

[rpjallan]

Thanks guys. I just thought it would be a useful resource to have all that great information easily available in one location.

[Chrissaf]

The requested tutorial has now been published.

[rpjallan]

Excellent...