Digitrax sells the Zephyr that is the runt of the litter. Next up is the Empire Builder… the middle sibling. Unable to read locos but good for boosting. And finally, the Super Chief is the top of the heap.
Your 6 wire cable is known as the “Loconet” in digitrax. That is necessary to communicate commands from the command station, to your panels where you connect the DT400 throttle either via radio or plug in.
Digitrax has radio availible. With the correct panels with antennas you can communicate to the command station.
DONT confuse your command station (DCS 100 or whatever) with a second station (OR several more) which is called a BOOSTER wired to provide slave power to a specific part of your railroad.
Also the loconet provides a platform to communicate to the extra booster or to switch machines or even to the signalling and in extreme cases to your personal computer via JMRI. But let’s not worry about all of that now.
I have a small industrial branch. A loop of track in a 12 by 8 room. I would run 12 gauge about 10 feet from command station to a big power distribution board. Then run from that PDB to 4 PDB’s equally spaced around the walls of the room. Each PDB is probably 10 feet away from the first one.
All track feeders in each of the 4 sections of the rectangles feed off the PDB’s in my scheme.
My kato switches run off the Digitrax DS 64’s which are connected to the Loconet (Your 6 wire cable) however the DS64’s are connected to the house via thier own power plugs.
Each of the 5 PDB’s present in my plan will recieve a local circut breaker. My train room will recieve a fast Ground Fault plug in the wall. Finally my Digitrax power supply plus the command station are all good fast protection.
First the Chief (DT100 throttle), then the Chief II (DT300 throttle), and now the Super CHief (DT400 throttle) have always been the top of the line systems. The Empire Builder series has been the middle of the road, until the Zephyr was introduced. Given features like CV readback and a dedicated programming track, I put the Zephyr ahead of the Super Empire Builder. A Zephyr plus a DT400 outdoes the Super Empire Builder in every feature except absolute power, the Zephyr being 2.5 amps vs the 5 amps of the SEB.
I agree. #14 is overkill for model railroading applicatons but we use it 'cause it is the standard size for house wire and thus readily available. According to the wire table #14 wire has a resistance of 0.2525 ohms per 100 feet. If all the current of a five amp booster went the full distance (no locomotives nearer than 100 feet) then the voltage drop might be 1.26 volts, which is nothing to worry about.
I avoid wire heavier than #14 because it is very stiff and hard to bend around terminal lugs and such.
Actually, while we were running btests for the NTRAK wiring RP adopted in 2005, we found that a voltage drop of more than 1 volt could lead to DCC signal degradation. The RP uses 12awg cable. We decided it was simpler to have it than to need it.
“signal degradation”? Does that mean failure of the locomotive to respond to commands? Or does it mean 1 signal packet out of 10,000 packets is missed?
I don’t do DCC, so maybe it is more tender than it ought to be. I have done RS-232, RS-422, IEEE 488, modbus, and USB. All of those worked just fine with a 10% voltage drop. I used to test digital signal processors. We required the DSP to operate properly and pass diagnostic tests with the power supply both 10% high and 10% low. I’d expect a DCC decoder to do as well, and work properly with track signal 10% low.
It’s not so much an absolute signal level issue as it is quality, I think. Many decoders are designed to work on anywhere from 12 to 22 volts! That’s a HUGE range. Over what can be a rather unreliable transmisison medium - track to wheels. With longer bus runs and loads, you can start to get some serious ringing in the signal, and it seems to easily confuse the decodersI don’t think the signal sepration in DCC decoders is very sophisticated - perhaps an area of improvement in the future, or to distiguish a more ‘premium’ decoder for lesser ones. However, it’s not a problem for the majority of people running DCC, even large modular layouts, so there is probably no reason to increase cost with more sophisticated signal detection circuits.
It means failure of the locomotive to respond. Also the frequency of runaways increased. I mentioned that that limit was part of tests for NTRAK. We run at 12 volts so 1 volt is an 8.33% drop. Tests were done using a 3 amp load with relatively new or new connectors on our modular bus lines. 1 volt drop became the absolute maximum as we know that wear and tear, different levels of skill, increased current draw,etc. would come to play as well. The idea was also to decrease the number of expensive booster/power supply combos needed for large layouts. Wire is much cheaper. Power Districts that need to be shortened won’t suffer either. As a bonus, we’ve found that our analog DC operations have improved as well and even had to turn down our DC power supplies that had been turned up to 14 volts to overcome voltage drop. We were burning out 12 volt indicator lamps with the heavier wire.