Alan,
Just to clarify for the OP, while you may have star pattern wired correctly, you didn't follow DCS wiring protocol. It requires electrically isolated track blocks comprised of approximately 10 sections of track, with one set of wires per track block located approximately in the middle of each given track block.
I've surmised that the key reasons for this protocol are basically two-fold: (a) to propagate a strong signal everywhere on the layout, as each DCS command only needs to be carried over (relatively) short distances of track; and (b) the track block isolation avoids a given DCS command from being communicated to the same engine multiple times via multiple power drops. Again, this is the likely reason why my track blocks with turnouts and 3 drops cause my "one command" to trigger 2-3 responses from the MTH engine in that block
Peter
