Prodigy Problems

Model Railroader Layouts and layout building
1

I’m moving things around tonight to get ready for a few visitors tomorrow, and suddenly things stop working. I’ve got MRC Prodigy Advance. This is a great system. I’ve had it for about 3 years now, and have had no complaints. Suddenly tonight, everything goes haywire.

Here are the symptoms:
Locomotive addresses are not acquiring. The readback says the address is right, but when dialed up, nothing happens. When the decoder is reset to factory defaults, the engine works fine on 03, and even things like speed matching and momentum work. Key in to set the address, it turns into a paper weight.

Consisting isn’t working, but only on some lokies. Key it in, read back CV19, everything looks fine, go to start it, nothing. Others work fine, although the headlight thing is screwed up. (next item)

Headlight function isn’t working right. Acquire the locomotive address, hit -0-, the headlight flashes for an instant, then nothing. Doesn’t work on individual engines or on consists. This happens on engines that do operate with their normal address (unaffected by the address problem).

I’m completely stumped. Tomorrow I’ll start pulling things apart to try to isolate the problem.
My question is, are these symptomatic of a decoder getting zapped, or do you think there’s something in the system that’s screwed up?

Note: There was a derailment that caused a short, but it was caught by the breaker pretty quickly. Also, the first engines that I noticed malfunctioning occured before the short…

So, are these symptoms of DCC in general, or do you think it’s an MRC-specific problem? I’m worried that since the symptoms are occuring in some engines but not all, that a bunch of decoders have gone down. I can’t afford to replace them right now (or maybe ever!).

Any thoughts?
Lee

2

I have the Prodigy Express, just bought it two weeks ago. after lerning a few programming secrets from other forum members, everything worked fine. Anyway, have you tried to re-program your engines?

3

I’ve had my Prodigy Advance for quite a while and have on occasion lost the loco address for reasons unknown to me. You might just try reprogramming one malfunctioning engine and see what happens. Also, for other unknown reasons, sometimes after the system is shut down by a short you need to reset it by unplugging the whole system for a few minutes. I doubt that the problem is in your Prodigy or more than one decoder went bad at the same time. If the loco responds to an “03” address it probably needs to be reporgrammed. I added a programming track booster to my programming track a while back and it elminated a lot of problems especially with BLI locos. You might want to check CV17 & 18 to see if they are still accepting four digit addresses or you can program the loco ID directly into them (Walthers has the 252 page QSI manual on their web site).

4

Thanks for the input. Unfortunately, I’ve tried all of that. The system is plugged into a power strip, which gets turned off between sessions, so in effect it gets “unplugged” after each use. I checked it again this morning, and the same thing is happening.

Also, I checked the CV for addressing, and it’s normal on the engines that are malfunctioning, and I’ve reset each decoder to factory settings, and reprogrammed them with the same disappointing result.

(For some reason, one of my two Intermountain F units came back to life this morning… it accepted it’s address, was able to consist, but still no headlight…[sigh] It’s twin responds to address 3, but won’t accept its own address…)

Also, one of the engines is addressed #23, so it’s hammering 2 digits as well as 4. Ironically, 23 was consisted with 40 (this lashup was involved in the derailment) and 40 is perfectly normal, again, except for the headlight thing.

I’m going to isolate the system to a single piece of track, then test each locomotive I have and note the results of each. I’m just not sure when I’ll have time to do that.

Thanks again.

Lee

5

You know it will start working fine once your guests leave.(Gremlins!)

6

I’m no expert; but could it be a problem with your decoders ? Just a suggestion.