Hi everyone, thought I’d share my journey on this model. First off, I think Loksound decoders are great and I have a handful of locomotives running them. That being said, this particular example had a few issues that I wanted to address and converting to TCS seemed to make the most sense.
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Current pickup was / is abysmal. I don’t have an explanation for this, but this thing will not make it around a sharp curve, let alone a turnout, without cutting out at least the audio. All efforts to clean the wheels, make sure I have at least one truck that can rock side to side, and check that both trucks pick up current did not improve things. So I wanted a keep alive, which meant I needed a new motherboard. Yes, I believe I could have added a KA to the Loksound setup somehow, but #2 below still wouldn’t be solved. Here’s a video that I took while trying to troubleshoot the pickup issues.
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The sound quality of the prime mover was not awesome. Beyond notch 4 or so, it just turned into white noise; it could have been constant radio static for all I could tell. Maybe this is prototypical, maybe not, but it just didn’t add much to the experience.
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The sound volume itself was very low and was drowned out by the sound of wheels on the rails at anything over medium speed (and I configure my locos to top out at less than half speed usually). I wanted to try a different speaker.
Parts list:
- TCS WOW-121 Diesel 21 pin decoder
- TCS AS-MB2-NC motherboard (this is for Atlas, but it is almost exactly the same size as the OEM board)
- TCS KA1 keep alive
- TDS Supersonic Mini speaker
- Mr. Super Clear flat spray (unrelated to the items above, but I don’t like shiny locos)
Rapido packed a crazy amount of lights into this thing: two different color directional ma