CW 80 Causes Accessory Lights to Pulsate/Ficker

Some of the early CWs had defects. You could try hooking it to a 10 amp or more bridge rectifier.  Put the A and U to the AC terminals and put a 4700uf 35 volt capacitor across the + and - output for accessories and lights. . That should remove the flicker  and produce filtered DC 41% higher than the throttle voltage. Lights and many accessories will run on DC. Exceptions are vibrator motors such as the radar tower etc.

Dale H

First, check the code on the bottom. If it doesn't have a G in the code, the outputs may be reversed. Red was the common. I believe Lionel would still swap these for you.

Secondly, it may be useful to use the accessory outputs and set the voltage with the button presses. It don't think the "chopped sine wave voltage" is output for the accessory terminals. This is typically set at 12-14vac from the factory, so moving your connection there to test for pulse/flicker would be easy.

Finally, what Dale said. Light bulbs don't really care whether it's ac or dc, but dc voltage for the lamps would eliminate the ac pulse.

The feedback loop in the regulator on the CW80 is not entirely stable at some settings. But I've used the accessory outputs which are stable. Since that voltage is not as easy to set, I've gone to a post war ZW transformer for accessory voltages.

Thanks for all the help everyone! I figured the easiest thing to try would be the accessory posts.

I programmed the accessory posts as the manual describes to my desired voltage, and viola! No more flicker.

Always to good to hear a solution. Let there be light!

It's curious how the accessory outputs would be different than the track outputs as far as regulation, they both use identical circuits to control the voltage.

I've found it sort of curious. I guess that the level is stored for the acc output and the chip has to repeatedly read the level for the adj output. So I think the repeated readings have a little jitter from reading to reading. Maybe affected by a little 60 Hz noise from reading to reading whereas the stored value is what it is.

Can't the output of the micro processor be programmed differently for each pin out?  If so, the regulation my not be the same.  Doesn't the Track out put have a sort of momentum with throttle settings, where as the Accessory output may not have any sort of wave form modification.  Just meant to hold a given voltage.  G

Ramp-up to throttle setting only when the direction button is used. Lever changes voltage instantaneously.

I just dug out my CW-80, and blow me down, the output does pulsate a bit on lower settings.  I don't really use the thing much, but it does exhibit what Rick is observing.