I don’t know if this has been posted yet. I noticed it on the Trainorders forums.
Has anyone else heard of this? Apparently there is an issue with the Atlas Gensets when used with MRC Tech 6 power supplies. The message doesn’t say which burns up, the loco or power supply.
Dear Atlas Customer,
Initial investigations have uncovered an incompatibility problem between the new Atlas HO Genset Locomotive and the new MRC Tech 6 Power Pack which could result in circuit board burn out.
Atlas strongly recommends that customers who have purchased this locomotive do not operate it with this specific MRC power pack. Atlas will inform customers of more complete findings as soon as possible.
In the atlas form i say that one of the atlas techs did say that they have not been tested for every powerpack. the Tech 6’s may not be the only ones that the engine has problems with.
If I had to make a guess, I would bet it’s a problem with the pulse current in DC, and it will destroy the circuit board componentry. However, I don’t know why this particular power supply would be the only one affecting the board… there’s got to be something more to it.
Frank from MRC has emphatically denied that it is the MRC Tech6 power supply causing the problems but they are looking into a possible cause for the failure to occur with this power supply.
There’s probably a lot of MRC TECH 6 owners out there with questions - it will be interesting to find out the cause.
So far, neither Atlas nor MRC has provided enough information to the modeling community to draw any conclusions. I think their announcement was made to keep people from damaging their locomotives, but it wasn’t very informative.
Pulse sure has been hard on DCC before, it may be that a combination of a badly design DCC board and the Pulse setting is to blame. I wondrer if Atlas and or MRC tried it withoutPulse. Whoever’s "fault it ends up being, it’s still good that both sides are trying things.