ateshci

The name is even known in Germany due to 'Midsomer Murders' of John Nettles' fame

Sure you can brew your own standards you adhere to on your layout and save a few millimeters ( or shall I say 1/32" ?), but if you want to take advantage of all available TT equipment, it is not a bad idea to adhere to the set standards

@Invicta Here are the relevant standards for clearance, and for the formation Cheers, H.

Never mind, the remainder is currently out of stock, too.

@BritInVanCA I have installed stay-alives in my HM7000 1st gen "Blink Bonny" ( of Scotsman fame) and "Night Hawk" after having had some funny experiences with BT before. Now I run them exclusively on BT and power the tracks with a 15V SMPS from an old laptop - no hickups, no need for DCC. Dead frogs are negotiated easily. Even the boffins can be wrong at times.

Standard TT-couplings depend on a rigid vertical mount to keep them horizontal. Many of the plastic close-couple holders are either distorted or are mounted in enclosures having too much vertical play when they move.

It's not a voltage doubler, but a full-fledged step-up converter that delivers 10V from an input of 5...1.5V, because the capacitor delivers the needed energy and is discharged therefore. The components on the decoder are a transistor to switch the charging current on/off ( I'm not sure whether it can handle more than 50mA ) and a reverse bypass diode into the motor/electronics supply to provide energy in case of contact loss.

Lest I forget -sometimes the hf current ripple ( same as the noise I referred to ) is too much for the decoder to tolerate. One can try to wire an inductor of 0.56mH ( maker: e.g. Delevan ) in series with the motor, as the resistive value of 4 Ohms is just tolerable @200mA and the additional space requirement of 8x11mm (dxh) can be tolerated in most cases. Sometimes even smaller inductors have helped, but that's a matter of trial and error ( or black magic 😀)

Use a screwdriver and gently pry it out.

Invoke stock alert, and ly back...(Things will happen while they can -'Big in Japan-Alphaville' )

A little late, but having used TOR-network via an Australian server one of the pictures looked like this:

This can happen when the motor is 'noisy' due to brush residue in the collector gaps. It will create current/voltage spikes then that hamper BT connection and may even upset the on-chip controller. A test would be to switch BT operation off and run by DCC - to show the severeness of the problem. If it stalls there too, a thorough cleaning of the motor is in order. In 'lighter' cases I've taken the motor out and ran it on 20..25V DC to burn the residue away - caution, you have to monitor the current draw. If it stays higher than 150mA for more than 30secs, the motor must be cleaned by other means, or may be faulty

They should work with every so equipped loco. Tillig had a hang for violating the norm in Plux-equipped locos, but that doesn't apply to Next18.

Still there's a misconception about the way most stay-alives work. There a few that use 10V...16V tantalum capacitors ranging from 100..1000 microfarad. The voltage drops by 10V during buffering and the time is rather short. All in all buffering in the milliseconds range. Then there's the majority delivering constant voltage for longer time intervals ( 2..10 secs) using step-up converters and supercaps. Lais' is one of them. Most of them use two supercaps in series to achieve acceptable COPs. These stay-alives are much better suited to support sound-decoders.

Sorry, the capacitors are rated 2.7V each. Please keep the facts correct.