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Rog RJ

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  1. You can buy buffer stops (R083) but these are designed for low speed use. A fast loco or train will knock them off and keep going. There are various electrical solutions such as insulated rail joiners (IRJs) which can be used to isolate the end of a siding.  The IRJ can be bypassed with a switch or a diode to allow the loco to be driven out.

  2. 34 minutes ago, Pendragon Sailing said:

    Thanks Rob.

    Any thoughts on why one of these would cause the observed running problems on DCC but not on DC?

    Because DCC changes polarity at somewhere between 7 - 10 thousand times per second and the capacitors and inductors (aka chokes) distort the DCC signal.

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  3. The end of the purple wire needs to be insulated, either with tape or heatshink.

    Decoders used to be supplied with a piece of heatshrink to put over the decoder. If this is not supplied you can put insulating tape over any bare metal to provide insulation.  I would try to avoid wrapping the decoder in tape.

  4. If you can read cv 8 & cv7 the values they contain can be used to find the make & model of decoder

    Have you tried resetting the decoder, normally done by setting cv8 to a value of 8.  The loco would then default to address 3.  Some decoder makers need different values writing to them to perform a reset.

    Decoder testers are available but these are just a sort of dummy loco really, which you connect to your controller, they don't do any actual testing.

    .

  5. Put the dummy car & the powered car on the programming track at the same time, do the programming  for the dummy car then remove it from the programming  track and program the powered car alone.  No swapping of decoders or decoder tester needed.

  6. Not sure,  I would try with my multimeter after removing the parts and checking the data sheets for pinouts and specs.  If anything looked a bit odd I'd get new parts, test and compare and replace if necessary.  If you haven't done this sort of work before it can be quite daunting.  Sometimes you need to replace a who;e bunch of components at the same time.

    I worked in an electronic repair workshop for a while and had training prior to that in electronics.  we had access to all kinds of test equipment that ordinary folk don't have.  We also had full circuit diagrams to work from.

  7. Having had a look inside mine, build code 11/07, it looks like the track output is fed by some kind of transistors/mosfets under the black heatsink (mine has different, plain aluminium heatsinks) then to the chokes and finally the track connectors.

    It may be that one or more of the output transistors has blown, causing Dodge's chip to burn out.

    • Like 1
  8. "So will give that a try, hope its just the one part thats gone..."

    That's why I asked what happened.  Was there a short circuit before it failed or perhaps it had been powered up for a long time.  Other parts may also have failed that caused that particular part to burn up.

    Perhaps RAF knows if there are any power transistors between the track connectors and the H bridge chip.

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