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Well I decided to buy something nice for christmas so I bought Hornby, two Royal Scots, two Patriots, one Britannia and one Stanier 4P. All were decoder fitted locos with Hornby's own decoders. As I have rubbished these decoders in the past I decided to give them a fair go and really see how they perform. I've been using DCC for nearly 25yrs from Hornby Zero One, CTC 16 and 32, Lenz, Wangrow System One, CVP Easy DCC and NCE Radio. I've built decoders, CTC 16, and used decoders from various manufacturers with varying results, some excellent, some good and some indifferent. But these Hornby decoders are ............. not good in fact they are attrocious. Any decoder that causes a loco to take off and shoot off the end of the programming track needs a rethink. I have yet to program one succesfully using NCE, System One , Decoder Pro and SrogII either on the programming track or on the main. Yet when I converted them to any other make of decoder, TCS, Lenz, ESU, Digitrax, CTE, NCE they program and run fine. So I decided to save one loco intact except for the RF supression cap which I removed and what do you know it programmed without running off and hitting the floor. So Hornby if you are going to continue to sell these decoder fitted locos remove the RF cap before it is sent to a reseller.
The decoder is still rubbish as the loco runs like a hairy goat so it got refitted with a TCS M1 and now it's as smooth as silk. Guess I'll be sticking to non DCC fitted locos from now on.
Rant over back to modelling.
Charles Emerson
Queensland
Australia
The decoder is still rubbish as the loco runs like a hairy goat so it got refitted with a TCS M1 and now it's as smooth as silk. Guess I'll be sticking to non DCC fitted locos from now on.
Rant over back to modelling.
Charles Emerson
Queensland
Australia