"The NJ HiRailers the club that has Legacy and TMCC working now? If so what was the ultimate solution??"
Yup. It was a combo of things. We've been working on it for months now. One member in particular, Bob D, had made it his life's work. We did 4 things primarily:
- We added ground wires in problematic areas (under overpasses, inside mountains, etc.)
- We ran U terminal wires from the Legacy base to a few areas on the layout.
- Most perplexing was moving the Legacy base to another outlet and things got much better right away.
- We built, installed and intimately modified a 455Khz amplifier that was designed and posted about a while back by Jim Lefevre. The amp at 1st did little but clean up the signal but was modified with Jim's help and increased the signal voltage significantly
We first started with Dale Manguan's signal strength meter to test the bases (which were good). Bob then built a signal strength car based on some plans posted here. We then started using an oscilloscope to visualize the signal. The scope proved especially useful as we able to instantly see changes as we added wires, moved the base and added the amplifier. It allowed us to see both the TrackLink signal strength and how clean it was. Before and after is amazing. Twice the signal strength and much, much cleaner.
Bottom line is for the last few weeks we've been happily running engines that would never run before. i think the biggest example is the VL Centipede. It's a diecast engine with a relatively small antenna. Prior to Bob's work it would just sit and flicker everywhere on the layout. Now I can run it around and around with no problems. We've run steam lash-ups and diesel lash-ups fine. Both Legacy and TMCC (but not mixed yet.)
We still have a little work to do to add ground wires in problematic places (under mountains in particular) but we've light years ahead of where we were just a few months ago.
We're trying to talk Bob D into putting together an article about this.
