Page 21 - March April 2009

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First Steps in DCC
I must admit that I thought that I was going to be the last one to go DCC. The technology didn't scare me - I come from a background in engineering and broadcasting and have been a licensed radio amateur for many years. I just wanted to be sure that DCC was going to work for me.
I'd been to a couple of shows and region meets where I'd seen people huddled over failed locomotives that had "forgotten everything" or "developed a mind of their own", muttering about CVs, which didn't inspire me with confidence. However I was tempted by sound. In 1979 for my OND project I built a railway sound synthesiser which, whilst poor by modern standards, sort of worked. I'd heard a few sound-fitted diesels at shows and been impressed, and a couple of recent purchases had the room for sound to be added later.
Following a small work bonus I purchased a Gaugemaster Prodigy Advance 2 controller and a selection of decoders for a "test program". My good old Athearn SW1500 was selected as the test loco to be fitted with a TCS decoder. The metal strips inside had long gone and the wheels had been changed to NWSL ones, but of late it was a fairly poor runner. Having no PCB it was easy to do a wired installation. I didn't worry about the lights at this stage - I just wanted to see something run, and run it did . . . badly!
Fortunately in the decoder handbook it mentioned back EMF being configurable and dithered control being an option. I selected this and turned off the back EMF, to find the loco ran
Chris Packman
very well. Later, lights were added and the loco has become part of the active fleet again. The job now began of converting the rest of the fleet .. .
DCC conversions should carry a five-star rating. Five stars (Easy) eg Atlas GP40 - pull off dynamic brake housing, pull out header plug from DCC socket, plug in decoder, put dynamic brake housing back on, program, enjoy! - to one star (Hard) eg Lifelike GP9 - attempt to get shell off without breaking too many detail parts, spend hours trying to understand the PCB, give up, remove PCB and throw in dustbin, dismantle chassis and mill out light guides to accept LEDs, reassemble chassis, wire in a decoder, put shell back on, program, enjoy!
What drove me mad was that some manufacturers (Lifelike) never do the same thing twice. The GP9 had 1.5 V lights with no dropper resistors, an SD9 had 1.5 V lights with dropper resistors, and a GP30 had LEDs with dropper resistors. SW1200s are fiddly but fun and quite quick to do, once you have done one. By now CVs didn't frighten me much (well, OK, except for 29 which I treat with respect).
Things trundled around the layout happily and the lights became a great attraction. A few days later my first sound decoder arrived, a drop-in PCB for a Kato SD38-2. It took all of about 10 minutes to fit, and from then onwards it was just WOW factor, it sounds fantastic. Funnily enough it often ends up when not in use on the siding nearest my operating position just idling . .
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