ColinB

You don't say whether this is a decoder in loco or decoder in tender type. To me it sounds like something simple like a connection to the motor is missing. Have you tried putting the old decoder back and see it still runs. I will run through the things I think it could be:- Bad soldered joint on 8 bin DCC decoder socket, which when you changed decoder disturbed it. The pins are thinner on the HM7000 so it is not making a good contact with the decoder socket. If the loco has a 4 pin connector between loco and tender then possibly an issue with one of the two inner connections (unless someone has modified it, it won't have one). Wire got pulled off when fitting decoder, if socket in the loco. Worse case it could be the decoder but I doubt it, but you could try fitting it in another loco. I have loads of these locos and they are usually no problem, they have the standard Hornby motor. As to the two repairers, I am amazed that they couldn't fix it. You check the decoder on a decoder tester and the loco either on DC or using another decoder, if you repair locos all the time not exactly rocket science. As I say these decoders are pretty good, so unless it is a manufacturing fault, I doubt there is an issue.

I bought one with it snapped so I fixed it. Here is what I did. I drilled a 2mm clearance hole in the bottom of the bogie in the centre in which I screwed a 12mm m2 screw. I then screwed a nyloc m2 nut onto this so that it tightened against the back of the bogie where the bolt is fed through. Then all I did was use another nyloc on the top of the bolt where it feeds through the bogie support plate

Thank you for the information, I didn't think Hornby could make that big a mistake. Do you know I looked at about 4 of my A3 locos, pre new BR logo and they all had that pipe on the left.

Ok am I going mad, I compared the new one with my old A3s and the previous version R3508TTS. Is the water pipe that runs down the side of the boiler below the hand rail on the wrong side? On all my A3 models it is on the left hand side looking from the cab, on this one it is on the right. I checked a few photos on the web and none of them have it on the right. Yes that plug is incredibly tight, nice idea but I can see many models having deep gouges where someone tried to lever it with a screwdriver. I finally got it off after about 10 minutes carefully using my fingernails as a lever.

No, I knew that from the chat with Hornby months ago. Generally the woman at Customer Services said they pickup daily.

Amazing, I just checked and it is about £7.00 difference and I am sure I got the Hornby club discount. The only time it is good to order from Hornby is when you think they might put their price up in the future. So if as say a couple of years ago they raise their prices by 20% then you will get it at the old price. Hornby at the moment are at the limit at which they can charge, so for the moment the price will not go up for a while and they removed the 10% discount and replaced it with points. So for the moment a Retailer like Rails or TMC will offer a better price and probably a better service. Incidentally the DPD site still hasn't received the package from Hornby so probably not today.

In theory yes, although I am not sure practically whether you would get some odd side effects.

Yes, finally powered up my Android pad and yes it works ok on that. We all know there doesn't seem to be an issue with phones, most of us have been using them to program the HM7000 for the past year but there does seem to be some weird effects when using a cheap Android pad, which I imagine most of us are.

It is just a thought but it is an Android device. When I was using my Doogie pad, I found the App ran incredibly slow. When you change the orientation the screen has to get redrawn, all the testers seem to have Ipads which are much faster, so perhaps it is just that the redraw just takes a long time on your device.

That is the trouble, most of the modern ones run really well, so Hornby has to fit gismos to make us buy another one. I haven't got a BR one and the option with smoke was quite a good deal, hence why I bought it.

With EBay it still goes on, it they take it to a Post Office then usually you can work out when it will come, but if they use the collect service then it is anyone's guess. As to Hornby when they send you the mail this is a link to DPD local tracking link, in my case it says "We've received your order details, and we are expecting your parcel". Now hopefully tomorrow morning the message will change but sometimes it takes a couple of days. It is only then that you know when it will get delivered.

It depends on when DPD come it to collect it. Hornby send the mail once it is in dispatch ready to be picked up. One of my orders took ages so I phoned up Hornby and a nice lady explained how it worked. I think in that case it had somehow got in the wrong pile, anyway she sorted it out for me.

It is when you get the mail from DPD, you know it is dispatched. Hornby in the past have sent that mail out and DPD haven't got it until several days later.

I only said if they used the smaller one it was 0.3F. I know about the booster when someone suggested a voltage doubler, I looked up the family of ICs that would do it. Train O Matic use a similar system but they only use one capacitor and a bigger multiplier. Trouble is the 1F part is much fatter.

I know I have thought that for a while. It is hard to say anything about this without seeing it. There are a few questions that I might want answered. We are told that it is using Voltage doubling device, but if you compare it with Train O Matic that use a similar technique, they only use one capacitor. If they do use a doubling technique I do wonder if the device will be more expensive when it eventually arrives as it requires significantly more components.

That is absolutely correct, if they are the mini caps which are smaller, then they are only 0.3 uF, hard to tell from the photo. So if they are mini caps then only 0.15 uF. We will have to wait and see.

Just had a mail from TMC to say the HD Silver King is arriving, funny how Hornby orders seem to come all at once.

Not really, the Rails system updated the credit card details on all my pre orders with one entry, rather than the Hornby drip feed system. Now if they dispatched it at the that time, then yes but we all know that it will probably be about a week, so they could have done it Monday morning. I just wondered if it was automated.

Saturday night at 11.04 pm I got an EMail from Hornby stating that my credit card didn't work to pay for my preoder that had just arrived. Nor surprising seeing as I cancelled that one over a year ago. Anyway I got a response at 1.02am this morning after I gave them the new card number. Surely Hornby weren't working and it was an automated process?

Thank you for that information, compared to all the other costs that is a reasonable price.

Unfortunately I haven't seen their code but I assume they did it the old way, download a load of bytes wait a defined period then send the next lot. In automotive you download the bytes and then wait for the module to send back a message to say it has done it, plus frame number and checksum of bytes received. If the frame number is wrong you send that frame again, we used to do it 3 times before an error is flagged. You can do it much faster as the flash erase time varies dependant to what is stored in there. If I remember rightly clearing a 0x00 to 0xff takes the most amount of time, so the programming time is not constant. Then you have the Smart phone end, I suspect they have used third party products which are easy to implement but generally very slow, our IT programmers used to always do this. I worked for engineering so I wrote my own interface which was much faster. The other issue you get with 3rd party tools is when they upgrade them, many businesses have got caught out on that one. Either way they are not going to change it, so we are stuck with it. It seems in my case the Android phone is quicker than my Android pad and I definitely am not buying an Apple product on principle.

I suspect they run it at 48 MHz if that is what the processor is set to operate at, using the phase lock loop to double it.

Yes, I noticed on mine last night. You can purchase the App for just under £18.00 which for what it is, is quite good value, I am not sure if that is a one off payment or annually. I am not sure about purchasing it I am quite happy with the windows interface but on the other hand it makes the pad redundant

A Ford Sync used to take an hour and a half, a powertrain unit five to ten minutes. Most of the others less than 5 minutes. Ford came up with a bit of AI that looks for bit patterns that reduced the size of the file by looking for repeated strings of byte patterns and replacing them by a lookup table which reduced the transfer and reprogramming times substantially.

Actually most modern processor use a phase locked loop to multiply the frequency, well the the ones I used in the past do. A lot use a simple clock crystal and then multiply up. Generally inside the processor there are a set of registers to set the required multipliers. As to reflashing the device once, yes that is what I do, so I go away and have a cup of coffee. In my old job a flash time in excess of 5 minutes would always be problematic as it means more chance of errors and that "hot line" you setup will be glowing red with calls. So generally you try to keep the time down to give you an easier life.