After almost a year of waiting, I finally received my AirWire 900 DCC system from CVP Products, on July 2nd. My initial impression is that CVP has incorporated all the features of their EasyDCC system into this product, so there is no learning curve at all if you already have the EasyDCC wireless system that you’re using for other scales. The biggest difference between AirWire and EasyDCC is that you must use on-board battery power for G-scale instead of track power. This is really a big advantage, since you will never need to clean track again, and that feature alone made the wait more bearable.
I’m now in the process of installing the AirWire 900 into a Bachmann Spectrum Consolidation. I installed the receiver inside the boiler, since there was plenty of room for the small circuit board and antenna. The receiver has its own DCC-controlled motor driver, headlight circuitry, and smoke generator circuitry. A SoundTraxx Sierra sound decoder and 3-inch speaker are in the tender, along with the batteries.
I stripped all of the Bachmann circuit boards out of the locomotive, since they had been dead on arrival anyway. When I purchased the Consolidation new, it didn’t work. I discovered that three wires had not even been soldered to the internal circuit board when it was assembled in China, and a couple of other solder joints were so poorly done that their wires soon pulled loose. Every wire was red or black, so there was no way of knowing what wire was supposed to be soldered where. Bachmann’s answer to my question concerning a wiring schematic of the locomotive and the wiring color code was, “The factory just uses whatever color of wire they happen to have on hand, and they have provided no schematic of the circuit boards.”
I eliminated the firebox flicker LEDs and circuit board, threw away the main circuit board, and added a resistor to the headlight LED wiring. The smoke generator is still wired through the on/off slide switch behind the smokebox front, even thoug