I managed to get some crappy pictures of the F45’s and some pics of the MRC 1806 (for Kato SD40-2) Sound decoder installed. You must use liberal amounts of Kapton tape under it and add solder to the pickup pads (for better connection) and you need to file down (narrow) the wide center of the decoder (where you see the kapton tape sticking up) also desolder and solder the motor pickups from the Athearn board to the MRC board and when installed the decoder os backwards so you need to set CV29 to 007 for reverse operation. Works well and sound is pretty good.
This thead is to let people know you can install the Kato SD40-2 board into this locomotive as you can not buy a board for this loco if you own the DC version.
Why don’t you do one and a video? I would love to see it.
You also are streesing the PC board (you can see it bending). If you were to remove the speaker from it’s default location and relocate it to the cavity, you will have a workaround for the bend. Even better would be to give it a little baffle.
Thanks Dave , I agree with the better sound moving the speaker to the hole and a baffle.
I just tried it because I have customers asking about boards for the DC version and wanted to see if it would fly for a drop-in type person.
In all reality I do not do sound at all and the decoder was removed after it was proven and a Digitrax DZ125 was put into the speaker hole. I Have background cd’s on the layout and use off board sound.
Actually my opinion is sound does not scale down well. I do like it on my 200’ of G Scale though!
