When I run my atlas gp-9 on my friends layout and a short circuit occurs on the layout
The Loco resets it’s self to factory default yet none of the other locos do this
Any ideas why this happens
Yes, this is DCC’s dirty little secret: shorts.
Shorts scramble decoder settings, and once in a while, will even blow the decoder. Officially, this should not happen, but reality is it does happen – not super often but often enough to be really annoying. A short is a catastrophic event to a decoder and the more you do to avoid shorts on a DCC layout, the better.
That’s why I talk about DCC short management here in this video. Using auto tail light bulbs as shown turns the short into a non-event and your decoder programming stays intact.
I’ve installed this kind of short management on my HO Siskiyou Line in 2000. Once I did that, scrambled decoders from shorts became history. My loco decoders rarely ever have an issue now and if they do, I immediately know its a bad decoder.
The other good news with this kind of short management is people hardly even notice now when someone gets a short because only the guy with the short stops running. Once the short is removed, the guy’s train will start running again and the decoders are always fine.
For about $1 per train block, this is really cheap insurance and it makes running trains on a DCC layout a real pleasure – shorts are no longer a big deal.
Hi Terry
Joe said the same I was going to. Good advise with short management. The other thing is what make decoder? Does it go to factory reset or just scrambles some CVs? I had a low end decoder that would lose its address only when a short happened. That went in the trash for a better decoder.
Pete
It’s a QSI sound decoder factory installed
It completly resets to all factory defaults
Come to think of it it’s the only QSI decoder on the layout
the others have different brands of decoders