Signal noise problems with WTIU and TIU with WIU

Do you know what the DCS signal integrity is when the problems occur; X/10?

Have you considered trying a power conditioner dedicated to your layout?

The reason I ask is the DCS signal is susceptible to line noise from the power source.  If there's a lot of noise on the 120V side, that passes through the train transformer and TIU/WTIU and gets superimposed on the DCS signal.  That can confuse the trains trying to decode the DCS signal.  Case in point, there have been recent discussions here on the forum about how the WTIU seems to have problems when powered by transformers with less than a pure sine wave output.

A suitable Line Power Conditioned filters out the noise and passes a much cleaner 60Hz 120V sine wave onto whatever's plugged into it's output.  In this case your layout.

I would normally never say this: what about DC power?

If you are running largely off grid, and you have a large MTH collection, and DCS, then those are DC compatible- one of the new selling points of the WTIU.

Caution- you then need to ensure you never put something Lionel or Lionel related (example K-line or something like an ATLAS with TMCC) because those electronics may be AC only and damaged by DC.

Again, normally, I don't recommend DC for O gauge because so much equipment is AC only- everything from sound cars, operating cars, a whole swath of TMCC era equipment that needs the zero crossing of AC waveform in order for the TRIAC outputs to turn off.

@Walter Bell posted:

Hi everyone,

The problem does not occur when I set up the TIU without the WIU, using the MTH remote.

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Also, for the WTIU- we have a solution that works for this with the DCS remote. Simple adapter anyone can build. https://ogrforum.com/topic/rtc...en-a-remote-and-wtiu

Thanks all for the suggestions. I will look into the power conditioner.

But does ayone have a guess as to why the problem does not exist on the TIU running without the WIU using the MTH remote? It seems like on the surface that the electronics talking to the engines would be the same whether the "back end" function of connecting with the remote function was to the MTH remote or to a smart phone over the wifi connection?

@Walter Bell posted:

Thanks all for the suggestions. I will look into the power conditioner.

But does ayone have a guess as to why the problem does not exist on the TIU running without the WIU using the MTH remote? It seems like on the surface that the electronics talking to the engines would be the same whether the "back end" function of connecting with the remote function was to the MTH remote or to a smart phone over the wifi connection?

That pesky problem of the app sitting on top of a 3rd party OS- hoping it's data packets go out the WIFI interface, not the cell data interface, hope they arrive at the WIU, hope it translates it to serial communications to the TIU- hope the TIU sends it to the engine, hope the engine responds in time, hope that response gets back to the TIU, hope the TIU sends the response out to the WIU, Hope the WIU sends it out back over the WIFI- hope it actually gets to your 3rd party device, hope the networking layer gets it to the app- all before it times out.

What could ever possibly go wrong........................

EDIT- the think the amazement is misplaced. You get angry because it doesn't work sometimes, you should be thrilled it ever does it right even once.

You haven't mentioned the signal the engines are getting when the issue occurs.  Are they all 10s?