I have two fairly new (I bought them new) Kato SD45 Loco's with digitrax decoders. These locos actually seem to acelerate and really run a long way (18 inches or more) when I turn the throtle to stop (digitrax Zephyr, kato unitrak). I don't run them at insanely high speeds. Other than set the decoder address I have changed nothing from the factory settings on the decoder. Do I need to adjust some other setting. Thank you for whatever help you can give. Jim @ J & M H Railroad.
Sounds like you have a lot of acceleration and de-acceleration set in CV3 and CV4. Try setting them to a lower value.
Try setting CV3 & CV4 to 0 and see if that makes any difference. Have you also set CV2, CV6 & CV5 values as per the Digitrax manual? Sorry, I haven't one to hand because I've swapped out all my Digitrax and now only use TCS
I use both TCS and Digitrax decoders (and nothing else). Are Digitrax decoders really THAT bad? I get what's available, but don't choose any other brand besides those two. I actually prefer the Digitrax golden white LEDs to the cold blue-white LEDs that TCS uses.
I prefer Digitrax decoders and have no problems with the exception of the loose fit which is easily remmedied. When I program decoders I first set CV's 3 and 4 to zero. I don't like the acceleration and deceleration feature and do not use it at all.
I can only speak from personal experience, but I've had 3 fail just 3 days out of warranty and another 5 DOA. As a result, I prefer to only use TCS decoders in my locos now - besides, I really like the slow speed performance of the TCS.
I switched to TCS for very similar reasons. Too high a failure rate on Digitrax decoders and too many DOA. I had many, too many decoders go bad after about 2-3 years. This was about the same time the high DOA rates happened. All portended to bad manufacturing controls. Recently, I had 2 bad TCS decoders out of a purchase of 150. And these were the first ever bad ones that I have had.
I have had only two Digitrax decoders fail out of about 100. One was due to my mistake during installation and the other was when I put a decoder in a 50 year old American Flyer Hudson and overloaded it with too many cars (55) causing it to stall.
