I found this digitrax deconder on a defective athearn genesis board from my sd70mac, replaced the defective one. But anyways the decoder says ATH-2 on it as well as the digitrax logo, will this decoder work in all athearn locomotives?
Well I couldn’t find anything about an “ATH-2” decoder online anywhere, including the Digitrax site. Did it come with the engine?? Could be Digitrax made decoders for Athearn to use in RTR dual-mode engines I guess.
Anyway…a decoder is a decoder, it should work in any engine, Athearn or other.
I need to know, was this a decoder designed to replace the Athearn RTR board? Is this a decoder that was plugged into the 9 pin JST socket? It the former rather than the latter, I recommend a Lenz Gold series JST decoder with back EMF. I would recommend this website
That’s not a decoder, that’s a “dummy plug” which permits the locomotive to operate on DC without a decoder. The components on the board are for the lighting.
Digitrax has had those available for many, many years (I remember getting a few when I bought packs of Digitrax wiring harnesses 10+ years ago). If I rememebr correctly, Athearn contracted with Digitrax to supply the dummy plugs for some of the runs of Athearn’s plug-equipped locomotives. The first runs of the Genesis Mikado and Pacific had plugs like these to permit them to run “right out of the box” on DC layouts without decoders.
That board arrangement was just one step in the evolution of Athearn’s support for plug-n-play DCC support. I don’t have a recent-run Athearn diesel readily on hand to check at the moment, but I don’t remember them using this style of dummy plug with the newer boards that have the eight-pin socket and nine-pin JST connector.
If you have a locomotive with one of these hanging off of a wiring harness, you’ll still need to replace it with a decoder if you want to run it as a “real” DCC locomotive.
The new boards (at least on my MP15ACs) are about 1/4 inch long and as wide as the 9 pin plug - just big enough to hold a couple of diodes. Digitrax decoders will fit right in (I used a DH123D).
