A while back I purchased two used RS-1s locomotives. They were not in boxes but on the bottom of the locomotives was “KATO-Made in Japan”
Inside there is a printed circut board plugged into the lighting board via an 8 pin connector. There are too many parts on this board to be just for lights, so I presumed it was a DCC Decoder. There is no sound.
I put one of the engines on my program track ( an NCE Power Pro system ) and it read back to me manufacturer code #11, which is NCE. I tried to clear the decoder by putting the number 2 into CV30. It did clear some CVs but not all. The short address stayed at 15 instead of the usual 3. The long address should have been 0000, but instead it was 115. I changed the long address to 213 and put it on the layout. It runs great. But it accelerates and de-accelerates extremely fast. I put the engine on the program track and set CV-3 to 10 and CV-4 to 4. But nothing changed, the engine still accelerates and de-accelerates extremely fast. Checking CV-3 and it had 10 in it and CV-4 had 4 in it. I did the same thing to the second engine and got the same results. I can change the address, but there is no response when changing other CVs.
Any ideas as to why I get no response after changing CV values?
Writing 2 in CV 30 will bring back all CVs to factory settings, not clear them all. That said, I can’t explain why the short address was still 15 after reset.
Why didn’t you try 0 for CVs 3 & 4? This is the factory setting for these CVs.
Shouldn’t matter how you program it. Service Mode is just program track. Ops Mode is programming on the main. A plain old motor decoder should work fine either way. Sound decoders with inrush issues, if they won’t work on the program track, usually work in Ops Mode.
It’s worth a try to do the reset via Ops Mode, if you knwo the active address of the decoder.Or take EVERY loco off the layout and program ops mode to address 0 - that’s a broadcast and all compliant decoders need to respond to it. Yes, even though address 0 doesn’t actually RUN anything with NCE. But it WILL program EVERY loco left on the mainline rails.
Of course, if it’s a very old decoder, it might not even have the reset option - that goes back a LONG time now, but there was a time when decoders didn;t have factory reset options built in.
ahh, thanks, Randy, I didn’t realize that. I thought that Service Mode was reserved to the manufacturer of the decoder who would use Service Mode to diagnose extraordinary decoder malfunctions.
Service Mode instruction packets have a short address in the range of 112 to 127. When the OP mentioned the address of 115 (although he did say that it was the long address), I began to wonder if he meant the short address, suggesting that the decoder was locked in Service Mode.
What is probably ‘wrong’ is that the decooder is locked.
You need to make CV15 = CV16. I’ll bet CV15 accepts values - if locked, it’s the only CV that will. CV16 is not supposed to be readable if they don;t match, but it’s worth a try. It’s not hard to brute force, there are only 255 possible values for CV15, one of them will match CV16 and unlock the decoder if it is locked.
Yes, NCE did support decoder lock in certain firmware versions.
Your best bet is to call NCE. They answer their phone, but not so good with email. In the past, when I have called with a problem, it has been worked out right over the phone.
