Several years ago I purchased a pair of P1K C-Liners, #5008 and 5013. I’ve always intended to run them as a paired AA set so I only put a sound decoder in loco 5008, a LokSound 5. In 5013 I put a basic Digitrax decoder and set CV29 for it to run in reverse. I had trouble speed matching them, especially when starting up. I experimented with CV3 values in both locos but finally gave up. Instead, I purchased a LokPilot decoder for 5013. This morning I installed it and set CV3 to a value of 6 in both decoders and CV4 to 3 in both. The manuals for both are online and they say exactly the same thing for CVs 3 and 4.
3 Acceleration This value multiplied by 0.25 is the time from stop to maximum speed. For LokSound 5 DCC: The unit is 0.896 seconds. 0 - 255 28
4 Deceleration This value multiplied by 0.25 is the time from maximum speed to stopFor LokSound 5 DCC: The unit is 0.896 seconds. 0 - 255 21
Unfortunately, 5008 is still starting up much more slowly than 5013. The only CVs I’ve altered from their factory setting are 3, 4, and 29. Are there other CVs that will affect the initial acceleration rate that I should be looking at? I’ve read through the table of CVs and there are a lot of terms that are foreign to me so I can’t figure out if there are other CVs I need to adjust. Here is the full LokSound manual, all 116 pages. The CV table starts on page 102.
What you need to adjust first is CV2 (Vmin), CV5 (Vmax), and CV6 (Vmid). (Make sure you set CVs 3 & 4 to “0” before doing that.) Once you’ve adjusted those CVs and the two locomotives run well together at all speed THEN add momentum. It may be that you will have to set the momentum higher for the Lokpilot than the LokSound to match start delays.
That seems simple enough. What is the reason I would need a higher CV3 setting for the LokPilot than for the LokSound?
UPDATE: I did as you suggested. What I’ve discovered is that no matter what the momentum settings are on the two locos, the LokPilot loco starts moving about 3 seconds before the LokSound loco moves. If I give the LokPilot loco a higher starting momentum value, it still starts moving before the LokSound loco, but then the LokSound loco will accelerate faster. If I seperate them by about a foot and turn the throttle up, the LokPilot loco closes the gap but then the the LokSound loco starts moving and because it ha a lower CV3 value, it accelerates fast and begins to widen the gap. Eventually they reach the same top speed but it doesn’t seem I can sync them up at start up. When they are stopping, they both seem to stop together.
I’ve done this on a few of my Lokpilot V4 decoders to match Loksound decoders in the other units of a “consist”.
What I did was assign “Virtual Sound” to F8 in the Lokpilot decoder. I use the Lokprogrammer so I don’t have the exact CVs in front of me. You can adjust the delay time to match the sound engine.
This then provides the adjustable delay while the prime mover revs up which is the typical feature of Loksound decoders.
It also eliminated the delay when you “mute” the sound using F8 so both engines then start moving almost immediately.
Alternately, you could eliminate the delay on the Loksound locomotive which would then mimic the Lokpilot. This setting is in the “Driving Characteristics” pane.
I could look later tonight to see what exact CVs need to be changed but don’t have the time at the moment.
Out of the box the Loksound decoder always runs a startup sequence so the locomotive won’t move for 20-30 seconds while this occurs. Once the sound locomotive has started its engine then both the Loksound and Lokpilot equipped locomotives should run in unison. The non sound Lokpilot of course does not have this feature. Rapido supplies its locomotives with this startup feature disabled because they don’t like it. This is easy to do.
Alternatively, in a consist, you can start the Loksound equipped locomotive using the function key and then wait until its ready to move off. Only then apply the throttle and both locomotives should then move off together.
Both Loksound and Lokpilot (5) now come in DCC designated versions for NA, Australia and some other market. As noted above the main difference is the momentum values are now North American compatible. If you have pre 2021 ESU decoders those won’t run well with the newer DCC designated versions.
To compensate for the start delay in the LokSound decoder. It may make sense (and be simpler) to remove the delay from the LokSound decoder, as Ed mentioned.
Delete bit 3 in CV 124 (deduct 2 from the numerical value it’s set to) will disable the startup delay.
ESU manuals are a bit obscure. The above comes from page 95 of the v.5 manual online at ESU.
F8 switches sound on or off but has no effect on this startup delay.
ESU describes it as a delay in moving the locomotive until the sound reaches notch 1 on the throttle sound (not speed step 1) for a protypical response. My earlier post about coordinating the Lokpilot and Loksound locomotives by waiting for the startup sequence to complete may not work.
My current Loksound locomotives by Bowser or Atlas have a startup sequence that is a different feature than the Notch 1 feature ESU describes in its manual. That’s the feature Rapido disables, or so I understsbd from the Rapido manuals.
OK, that sounds good. I don’t have LokProgrammer so I will have to go through the CV table and figure out which CV to adjust.
Some of these features on the higher end decoders to me are an unnecessary PITA. Yes, it adds realism but at the cost of complexity. I prefer very low momentum settings because I like to use the throttle to make gradual starts and stops. When stopping, I want to know the loco is going to stop when the throttle step hits zero. I don’t want it coasting past where I want the loco to stop.
Ed, I just received the Walthers passenger trucks you sent. I will put them to use shortly. Thank you.
One Budd car upgraded. I’m running it through some test trials now and it seems to be doing OK. I swapped trucks with one of my worst performing cars and so far no derailments. I don’t know what the problem is with the old trucks because just eyeballing them, I see no difference between the trucks I removed and the ones I replaced them with other than the original trucks were painted silver and these are black. There is a huge difference in how they perform. I think these replacements are more free rolling than the ones I removed. Maybe that’s the answer.
Do you own a truck tuner? It’s a wise investiment for freeing up any sluggish wheel sets that don’t spin freely in their plastic trucks. You can purchase one from Micro-Mark. Worth every penny in my book…
I checked out these two links. The first is a thread from 2016 and I’m guessing they are discussing a Lokpilot/Loksound 4 or earlier. They seem to have settled on CV128 as the one to control the start up delay. It appears ESU reconfigured the CV table for Loksound 5 because CV128 is for analog maximum speed. I checked the factory settings and both were set to zero.
The second link is about using LokProgrammer without being specific as to what CV it is adjusting. It’s also about LokSound 4.
I was having trouble finding the correct CV in the online CV table but then I got the idea of doing a word search for delay and that eventually brought me to the third bit of CV124 as the control for the start up delay. While it is the third bit, it is bit number 2 since the bits are numbered 0-7. This took me back to my mainframe programming days and the convention of using displacements to address bits and bytes. I needed to turn off bit 2 which my understanding of binary arithmetic told me to subtract 4 to zero out the third bit (bit 2). Before doing anything I checked the factory setting of CV124 on both locos. According to the online manual, the factory setting for CV124 is 21 but when I put the locos on the programming track, both locos displayed a value of 4 for CV124 which means the start up delay bit is the only one being used. For whatever reason, the Lokpilot loco was ignoring the start up delay. I decided the best thing to
That seems to be the consensus. I don’t know if it is a bug in the LokPilot software but it doesn’t seem to respond the the start up delay CV the way LokSound does. To me it’s not an important feature at all. Now that I understand the problem, disabling it on the LokSound decoder isn’t something that bothers me at all. Sometimes I think the manufacturers are going overboard with all these features they are putting into their decoders. Was there really a great demand to have the engine startup in sync with the prime mover sound? I seriously doubt it.
UPDATE: I was just going through the posts in this thread and I realized why LokPilot wouldn’t have the start up delay. The whole purpose of that delay is to sync the movement of the engine with the start up sound. The LokPilot has no sound so there would be no reason to program this into the decoder. DUH! I guess they didn’t consider the possibility of a LokPilot and LokSound being used in the same consist. It makes me wonder why they bothered making 4 the default value of CV124 in the LokPilot if it is just going to be ignored.
For Bowser they describe it as does ESU, the engine must reach notch 1 before it will move even after the startup delay is complete and the locomotive is “running”:
At page 10 referring to sounds. Rapido confirms they switch the startup feature off and refer the customer to ESU for instructions on how to read-activate it:
The LokPilot has the start delay, at least that’s my understanding.
The idea was so you could use the LokSound decoder with the Pilot.
To start-you hit F-8 this started the sound in the LokSound and also made the Pilot go to the start delay- that way the two decoders would have a start delay. If you did not do this one decoder would push/pull the other . When I did this trying to get both decoders to start/stop together was a BIG problem for me and I just quit trying after hours of chasing CV’s