OK, time to step up. I have been playing with the cycle timer that hokie71 and others on the forum have been going crazy with. I bought 4 of them on Stan's suggestion and when I powered them and every one of them just looked at me with the display on "0", I was looking up Stan's address (just kidding, don't know what I would do without all his help--invaluable resource to this forum). So let me do a little heavy lifting to give Stan a rest.
For hokie: My problem turned out to be my power supply. I was using one of those inexpensive AC/DC supplies I bought on ebay. As part of another project (IR detection), Stan put me onto bridge rectifier and DC regulator modules on ebay. I connected the output of one of the DC regulator modules at (even less than) approx. 12vdc and viola, it started working.
Now how the heck do you use the thing. Well after reading the posted 8-pg manual many times, I got it to work. I wanted to use it to operate my 2-light crossing signal (no. 154).
When you first power it up, it will display "0005" and then count down to "0001". Now press and hold the SET button. The display should read "--01" and the blue 'Mode'LED' should be lit. You can move from the 1st to the 2nd digit by pressing the SW button. I wanted to use mode 16, so I used the SW button and moved the display to the 1st digit. I then pressed the NUM+ button until "6" was displayed. Then I used the SW button to move to the 2nd digit and used the NUM+ button to enter a "1". I was now in Mode 16. I then tapped the SET button and the display changed to "0000" and the T1 blue LED lit. At this point I could program the time the T1 part of the relay was on--I chose "0001" for 1 sec. I then tapped the SET button again, and the display changed to "0000". I repeated the process above and set the T2 on time to 1 sec. I tapped the SET button again and the display changed to "0101" and the NX blue LED was lit. I didn't know what that meant until I read the instructions again. That function changes dependent on your mode selection. For mode 16 it just meant that T1 and T2 would cycle on & off at a 1 sec. interval ("0101", 1st 01 is T1 time, 2nd 01 is T2 time).
I hope that this will help.
Oh, by the way, I then applied 12vdc to the trigger terminal (CH1) and the module began toggling T1/T2 and did eventually operate my crossing signal.
Ken