What do you mean power decoders piggy backed with sound decoders? Cant seem to remember anything on that subject in any of the dcc magazines. booyak......

DCC decoders come in many flavors. Besides each manufacturer, there are decoders that only provide engine control w/ lights, but no sound. There are sound only decoders. Then there is control plus sound in one decoder.

The 'piggyback' you speak of refers to a setup such as: using an NCE408 decoder (control and lights only) together with a Soundtraxx DSX (or DSD) sound only controller, in the same engine. You do need to be careful when programming, that you don't send commands to BOTH decoders, when you only wanted to adjust one or the other.

Some also will use Soundtraxx Tsunami decoders, the HO model for sound only, (which actually also have control) since I understand many like the sound quality.

Still others will purchase a LokSound or MRC decoder, which has both control and sound.

Chris,
Can you elaborate on the Loksound?
Thanks,
Ed

Booyak

You probably haven't seen mention of piggybacked sound and power/lights decoders as most articles were written by guys modeling in HO or N scale, and they have a raft of integrated (motor control/lights/sound) to choose from. O scale DCC decoder choices for a long time were limited by our locomotive’s current draw being higher than the ratings of the many HO decoders on the market. For quite a few years, the only way for an O scaler to put DCC & sound in a heavy locomotive was to use 2 decoders - one high amperage decoder for motor control (power) and lighting, a second sound capable decoder for locomotive sounds. This was relatively easy to do by putting the decoders in parallel and setting them to the same long address (engine number). I simply programmed each decoder separately on the workbench before wiring them together. A more robust approach is to put a switch on each decoders so that it can be turned off if you are resetting the other decoder in the locomotive. Using different short addresses for each decoder, while sharing the same long address I believe would give you the same capability.

Piggybacking is still a viable option, but now there are quite a few more heavy duty integrated sound and power decoders on the market for O scalers to choose from.

Ed Rappe

Ed K,
I do not know much about the specs for the LokSound product, other than their series 3.0 or 3.5 are designed for O scale. They do have a very extensive web site for info. If you land on the German version, find the link for the English one.

I do know John Dunn have used these decoders in several installs. Perhaps he can add to this.

IN OST #40 Ray Grosser did an article on installing an NCE & Tsunami in an MTH WM H9 2-8-0.

Joe G.