Quad problem

  Jim sent in this useful information in the hope it may help someone else. He did omit telling us about the hours of testing and checking, reading and consulting, that helped solve this problem. 

We had hooked up the command station a DCS 240 DigiTrax and had also had our first section of bus wire put in. Our first quad unit power manager, PM42 was then hooked up. Then we attached the four blocks to the quad unit and did our track testing of shorting out the track with a quarter trick.

When you do this the PM 42 is supposed to shut down the individual block that is shorted out so that you do not shut down the whole system. But each time I shorted out an individual block the entire PM42 shut down along with the command station We checked all of our wiring and hook ups and settings in the PM42 but could not find the problem.

I went online and asked DigiTrax and also a few of the train sites asking some of the guys for suggestions as to what the problem was. Somebody on one of the sites recommended going into the command station and changing the option switches. Specifically option switch 18 which is the booster short circuit shut down time. By changing this from T (throne) to C (closed) it changed the shut down time to a longer time.That allowed the PM 42 to trip the block before the command station tripped out and in doing this, it solved our problem. We could not find this information in any of digitrax manuals.

The command station and the PM42 for the four blocks on the layout, that we have wired, are now working properly.

Very thankful to the person who recommended this action

Thanks again

Jim