Well thanks to all the help I got from the forum members and barry's book, I now have my mth dcs diesels running on my legacy layout. Before I go into problems solved, let me describe my system.
I am running 2 loops of fastrack, 1 major siding and 5 spurs all controlled thru toggle switched blocks. My power is 2 lionel 180 bricks, zw transformer. my control system is legacy cab2 and dcs tiu (hooked independently to the track). the tiu is quite old.
problems solved:
dcs remote locking up. yep changing batteries solved problem.
Engines running erratically with lots of "out of range" and "no active locomotives" error message and low signal strength. lots of engine resets. This one I really struggled with, coming close to scrapping the dcs system out of frustration. My first approach was to remove all my lionel legacy engines from the track completely with no success. next I looked at the engines (n&s sd70 and ge evo es44 diesels) and had them checked out on a separate dcs system. They checked out fine. As I was doing a lot of feature and factory resetting, I began to look at the tiu unit. Rereading barry's book and reading a lot of past posts here on the subject, I tried switching my fixed output channel to #2 and delete #1 on the remote. lo and behold, my signal strength on both engines went from 2-3 to 10 all around the loop tracks and on the spurs. And the engines purred even with my legacy engines on the track. Presently have a new tiu unit on order. What with the remote lockup problem solved along with this, I am happy to say all is running fine on the Miller Valley RR.
Many thanks to all who helped me and to barry for his very valuable book
