I haven’t been here for a long time now. One reason is because i wasn’t very interested into model railroading. Well as the topics states. Who has sound here. But in a diesel locomotive. My friend Curt has Lok sound in his Athearn BN F45 kit but the decoder gets warm. This only happens when he is driving it. When it sits it cools down. What should he do?
The decoder gets warm because it’s driving the motor in the loco. This is usually done with Pulse Width Modulation, very quick pulses to the motor to control the speed. The electronics get warm because of this.
Most decoders will be the same.
If the motor is drawing more power than the decoder can supply it will probably fail eventually.
On a DC layout one can measure the motor draw (with out the decoder) to see if it is within the decoder specs
Ken.
I have several diesels with Soundtraxx sound decoders, they do warm up a bit but as Ken said I think that’s normal with a decoder.
I’ve done about 10 Loksound installs and so far nothing has melted! Honestly I don’t know if they get warm or not since they’re inside the locomotive, but I haven’t had any problems. The Loksound 3.5 is rated for 1.1 amps which should be more than enough for most modern HO locomotives.
I have an Atlas SD26 with sound. It gets hot after running it for a while, but on DC with power constanly getting fed to it even when idling, I guess they would get hot. DCC locomotives get hot just sitting too.