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Header: Hal-Zuzzu Model Railway Build Blog |
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| Published: Wednesday, January 19, 2022 | ||||||
| Post: #109/174 - Views: 45006 |
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DCC Bus Termination. I’ve been having an issue with my layout ever since I powered it up the very first time. I could not understand why points failed to operate when I tried to control them manually but then worked fine 99% of the time during automation. There was no pattern. It was like the layout had a mind of its own. Days would go by without a single issue but then out of the blue, it happens. Points fail to operate and a train takes the wrong siding. This can be a disaster because at times that siding could be occupied by something else or the point was approached from the frog end and was thrown in the opposite direction of the approach. This would end up with the line being shorted. In a nutshell, it was becoming quite annoying. Very unpredictable!! I did some research and asked about it. No one ever gave me enough info to find an actual solution. I think my problem was because I was not explaining myself well or not describing the problem well enough. Being new to all this does not help towards knowing the right terminology for some of the issues one would meet in the hobby. Each time I would give up trying to find a solution and again when I would have had enough, I’d ask around again .. until one day not too long ago, someone mentioned “DCC BUS TERMINATION”. Coming from an IT background, I remembered the termination we used back in the day of coaxial cabling. In a blink of an eye, it all made sense, so armed with the new info, I did some more research and found a good and very affordable idea to try.
The idea was to bridge a capacitor and a resistor across the end of the DCC bus cable. The post I found described the components to be a 150 Ω 2W Resistor and a 0.1 uF Capacitor. Drove down the road and got myself four sets of each. When they are this cheap, it is not worth going home with just one set. The four cost me all of €2.75. Soldered the components and installed them in place. Reset the z21, and give the points a try.
IT WORKED!! I could not believe it! All is working perfectly at last!!! I can now start working on the upper-level baseboard and not worry about any pending major problems on the lower level!!! Here is a more detailed video of what I did Check out the live CCTV camera HERE |
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