rad400 posted:Adrian! posted:cnwdon posted:Thank you. The time you invest in helping educate us is deeply appreciated. Assuming I get a scope and learn to use it for this limited application, what I am drawing from your comments is this:
Measure the waveforms at various track locations with a locomotive nearby on that track, for V amplitude and “crispness”, and look at actual loco performance and DCS remote signal ‘strength’. If the combination suggests it, cut a mainline into two (or more) TIU channels rather than just blocks on one channel, to reduce capacitance per channel. Am I following your thinking correctly?
Yup that's how we did it basically. There are other small tricks you can do with wiring using sections of twisted and non-twisted wire to cancel capacitance (link for people who might care), but in general we just try to keep everything well distributed among the 20 TIU channels (5 of them).
Can you list some of the small tricks you refer to in your post above, using twisted & non-twisted wire to cancel/lower capacitance.
Thanks,
Bob D
We look at the track with the scope and if we see the time constant is low we intentionally untwist a section of wire, or we put a turn or two in shunt with a large resistor to ring it out with shunt inductive peaking. It's works pretty well if the section of track you're trying to peak out isn't too long.
