DCC idea for "power independence"

Right - and my comment also had a smiley. :-D

Peteski

I don't follow rec.models.railroad much lately. To busy converting my roster to batery backup :)

To help others understanad this and avoid the "absolute horseshit" comments I put up a WWW page (including videos) explaining the concept as I have implemented it.

Since I wrote this set of pages Lenz built a small circuit board to replace the relay and charging circuit. This also reduces the cells needed to 6 or 8 and allows much more range in the DCC track voltage for the charging circuit to work. I have my first couple installations just now going though testing of the revised ciircuit.

As has been pointed out earlier in this thread, Lenz uses capasitance pickup so the decoder does not need an electrical pickup to the rails to read the DCC signal.

For those of you that have problems with this consider the properties of a capasitor. Two pieces of metal seperated by an insulator. Now what is a metall wheel on dirty metal track....

The DCC signal is bi-polar which has the effect of charging and discharging this rail, wheel, dirt capasitor. Software within the decoder signal processes this charging/discharging cycle to reconstruct the DCC signal.

Please note that this rail/wheel capasitor is not the energy store. Energy storage to power the decoder and motor, while no electrical pickup is present, is provided by a seperate on board capasitor or battery,

One surprise is that it can work off of one rail, not sure how it gets the ground reference but it does wook as illustraded in the video.

Now back to the conversions as I have 25 more locomotives to go.

Stan