Hello all, Just curious if anyone has come across this before. I have a used Digitrax DCS50 / Zephyr (non Xtra) that I picked up, and it seems to be having a weird issue. Not sure if it's related, but it gets quite hot, much more so than I recall the other identical one I had and sold previously. Anyways, it does weird things like occasionally the horn will just start going at a steady interval like once every second, and then stops again after some random amount of time. While it's doing that increasing the throttle increases the sound on the loco as if it's accelerating but it doesn't move. At some point it will return to normal on its own, or I can power cycle it one or several times and it will start working again as well. I opened the box up and tried putting small PC fan in there blowing on the circuit board but that doesn't seem to have changed anything. Thoughts anyone? Cheers, Dave
I have a Zephyr Xtra and a Classic and neither gets even remotely warm. I also have a meter that measures DCC track voltage and current so I know at all times the power being delivered to the layout. Have you determined whether the trouble originates with the Zephyr standalone or when connected to the layout? Is the unit heating up all the time or just when DCC track power is on?
It's definitely still delivering voltage to the track, the train has consistent sound coming from it the whole time. It's just like something is weird in the circuitry somewhere that makes the F2 horn go intermittently for no apparent reason. I can leave a train just sitting there (one factory sound loco on maybe 12ft of directly wired track -- and not any particular part of the track, which it runs back and forth on fine) for maybe 15 mins and for 95% of that time it just does the train idle sounds and behaves normally, but the other 5% of the time it randomly sounds the train's horn on and off every second. I bought it as part of a large lot of random stuff so I didn't pay a huge amount for it. Probably not worth sending away for any repairs. But very strange, and I was just curious if it was something others had come across before and if there's a fix for it that I can do myself. Dave
If the unit is driving at close to maximum power then any perturbation of the DCC signal can be misinterpreted by a decoder and trigger anomalous behavior. You could set up a single piece of track with the offending locomotive so there is a well defined test case. If the unit heats up and misbehaves then I would suspect the unit. If it doesn't misbehave then there could be a problem in the layout.
Oh I definitely do already suspect the unit lol. What you described is what I currently have set up, one loco on a short piece of straight track directly wired to the Digitrax, nothing in between, no programming track, nothing else. Digitrax power supply that came with the unit. Dave
It doesn't get any simpler than that. Sounds like you have isolated the problem. My condolences. If it were my unit I would inquire about the cost to repair.
