Big_Boy_4005 posted:Chris Lord posted:Here's some TMCC/Legacy signal improvement info I put together after a series of emails with a Lionel Sr. Electronics Engineer (the guy who designed the Legacy radio boards.) We've used this info at the NJ Hi-Railers and have vastly improved our TMCC/Legacy signal strength.
Very interesting stuff Chris. I haven't seen many of those tips you posted in that PDF. It seems I've done a lot of things very wrong in the way I've wired my layout, and some may be next to impossible to correct.
We're in the same boat on some of the issues. Especially not running the wires in parallel. But it's also too late for us to correct. Bob's building of the signal strength car was a huge help in overcoming the issues we had. We were able to objectively observe the effect of the changes we made.
We made two classes of changes.
1. We wired what we call a "earth ground buss". This runs from the outlet the Legacy base is plugged into completely around the perimeter of the layout. Every 20 ft or so we wired in a terminal block. We tapped off of the block whenever we needed to run an earth ground near a problem area.
2. We did something similar with the U terminal from the Legacy base and tapped it to the outer rail in problem areas.
We would take a signal strength measurement before and after each change. The earth ground by far made for the greatest increase in strength. One issue we had to deal with is that we're in a 130 year old building with light manufacturing on other floors. Who knows what state the ground is in. We briefly considered having out own service installed and isolating us from the rest of the building but fortunately we didn't have to go that route.
Some people might not agree with the tips in the document but I can assure you they come right from the horse's mouth at Lionel.
