 Hi, Bruce here at the Pebble Creek Model Railroad Club. This is a Digitrax Club, so we're going to spend some time talking about the Digitrax throttles and how user-friendly they are and how ergonomically they work with your hand and with your system. I'm going to start off with the DT400R, which is their Digitrax current version of the programming throttle. Now, there's a 400, there's a 402. The difference between those two is just the number of functions that they can access. This happens to be a 400R for the Simplex radio version of Digitrax, but they all work pretty much the same, so we're just going to go with this and go from there. For starters, let's talk about what you have to do to run radio with this throttle. First, to have radio, you've got to have some power to it. There's a door on the back that you push on and it slides open and there's a nine volt battery inside of there. To break the throttle, you need to put the battery in in the proper direction so that we'll have power and when you do that, the display shows the battery voltage as it comes up. Now the battery can be stored by flipping it over, just rotating it and now there's nothing on the display and it's shut off. Okay, fine. If you, instead of rotating it, if you flip it end for end, there's a metal clip down here. That metal clip will short out the battery and in very short amount of time, you'll have melted case. That's what I'm looking for, the word case. Okay, I'm going to put the battery in here and let you see what shows up on the display as the battery comes in. See it comes up and it goes through and it shows you the voltage and then it shows that it's idle. Now you can put the cover back on the back of the throttle and when you're done, if you don't have a place to plug this in that is powered 24-7, you need to either take the battery out or rotate it so that it doesn't draw power or else it'll be dead in about 20 days, something like that. It will go into a sleep mode but it'll still go dead on you. Next let's talk about what it's going to take to acquire a locomotive onto this throttle. Okay, here we are at a throttle panel area on our club layout. We have a DT400R here and a UT4 non-radio, you can tell by the coiled cord, plugged into a Digitrax UP5 here. So let's acquire a locomotive 1560 on this DT400R. So the first thing we do to acquire a locomotive is to plug into the layout. The throttle must be plugged in on the Simplex radio system for it to be able to acquire a locomotive. Okay, now that we're plugged in, in order to acquire the locomotive, we'll press the LOCO button and we get a number there. Now we want to key in 1560, the locomotive that we wish to acquire that says STAT128, which means it's 128 speed steps. We press the enter button and it stops flashing. We now have control of the locomotive. We can unplug from the layout and go run the locomotive. Okay, here we have 1560 parked rather precariously on a bridge on the layout. We have him acquired on the throttle and so I'll give just a little bit of throttle so that he will start up. This is a bald one from Stewart with a factory tsunami in it and it's programmed so that it won't make any noise until you give it some throttle, give it some commands. Now this particular locomotive, the owner has opted to have the headlight controlled by function 5 and the rear light controlled by function 6. Move the camera around here to a different angle so that you can see the locomotive. You're looking at the front of the locomotive, the long hood is forward on this guy. We're going to press function 5 and the headlight comes on. Similarly when we press function 6, the rear light comes on. You see the 5 and the 6 appear on the display here so you know that those functions are active on this locomotive. There's a bell, it's on function 1. Function 2 is a horn that runs just as long as you hold it down. Function 3 is a short horn. Now you'll notice this throttle is set up so that I can operate it with one hand. Now I can get up here and I can operate the locomotive, send it forward and backwards. Now I can reverse it with either the reversing key here or by double tapping the throttle button that I'm working with. Now I'm right handed so I like to have the locomotive that I'm running on the right hand throttle because my right thumb falls to it. If I were left handed, I would prefer to operate it off the left button because my left thumb would work with it. So running a locomotive with the DT-400 series throttle. It doesn't matter whether it's a 400 or a 402, they operate exactly the same way. Okay, let's talk about what it takes to program a locomotive with the DT-400 series throttle and the Digitrack system. When you press the programming button here, if you look in the display right up here in the middle where it says FN, that will show you what programming mode you're in. So it cycles through PG, which is page mode programming, PH, which is physical programming, PD, which is direct, or PO, which is ops mode or programming on the main, and it shows you the address of the locomotive it's going to program. We're going to talk about programming an address which doesn't work well doing that on the main. So we're going to go back to direct mode programming, which is one of the faster ways to program if the decoders support it. You'll notice it's come up and it says 82 equals, and then there's some question marks. Adjusting the right, excuse me, the left knob here, you'll go through different CV numbers. And just below CV2, it says 82, which is actually CV1. But that's where it is. Then the right knob will program or set the number that's going to be programmed to. So we're going to program address 2 to 50, the way this or the two-digit address to 50, the way this is set up. So we press the enter button and it writes it and it came back and it said good there. Now to program the four-digit address, you push the right knob once and it takes it to the four-digit mode. And so these, the left two digits are adjusted by the left knob and the right two digits are adjusted by the right knob. So let's set it for an address of 2050. Okay, so I dial up 2050 here. Now I'm going to press enter and it's going to come back and ask me if I want to make that the active address. I have to press the Y key for that to happen. So I press enter, it writes it. Do I want to make it that correct? I press the Y key. Now it set up CV29, CV17, and CV18 to have 2050 be the four-digit address of that locomotive. One of the last things to show you here is how the DT400 series throttles throw turnouts. You see here, you're in the locomotive mode. If you press the switch button here, it goes to the switch mode. It says switch three is thrown. So let's go to five and throw it. And you notice it stays. So we can close it. We can throw it. We can go to six. We can close it and just cycle through them and still retaining control of the locomotive while we're in the switch mode. Okay, now that we're through working with this throttle for this session, we want to dispatch the locomotive that's on it, that 5060. So we plug it in. We press dispatch. Whoops, no, it was on the wrong side. So we press the knob to where we're over here to where we're running 5060. I see it fired up again. Then we press locomotive and dispatch. It comes up with a flashing select so we know that the locomotive has been dispatched out of the system. We're ready to leave except for the fact that there's still a battery in this throttle. So we either remove the battery or rotate it 180 degrees and put it back in as opposed to flipping it, as I said earlier. Okay, with the battery in that position, when you pull the cable out of the wall, the display goes blank, so we know that the power is off to that throttle. All right, now let's look at using the UT-4 throttle. This is the wired version. They look the same, just the radio version has a short cord up here instead of this long coiled cord. UT-4, you'll notice fits very nicely in my hand. You have a nice knob rotation here that's a potentiometer throttle, so you have the 270 degree rotation with a line on the knob so you know where you are. That's about half speed, so on and so forth. There's a forward and reverse button up here that sends the locomotive the direction that you want it to go. Let's select 1560 again on this one. There's a four-digit selector across here, so we select one and five and six zero, so this is one, five, six, zero. Now the red light says that we're not connected, we're not talking to that locomotive, so how you acquire it is you unplug the throttle, then as you plug it back in, you acquire the locomotive and you get the green light. Okay, now let's go back over to the bridge and run 1560. Okay, here we are set up, ready to run 1560. The sound is off as I use the emergency stop switch on the DT400 to shut off the sound to the locomotive. I'm gonna give it a little throttle, which, oops, now you notice it. I gave it a little throttle, but nothing happened. It's because the selector switch was centered. It's not telling it to go forward or to go reverse, so I'm gonna tell it to go forward and give it a little bit of throttle. And you'll notice when you send the direction command, you get a little flicker in the light here sometimes, showing that a command was sent. The function buttons down here functions zero through six are zero, one, two, three, four, five, six right across there, so you've got bell, long horn, short horn. Remember this locomotive five is the headlight, so I press five and the headlight comes on and function six, the rearlight comes on. So we're all set to run the locomotive. We send it, we give it some throttle, it goes forward. We send her the selector and it stops. We throw the selector to the reverse position and it goes backward, okay, backwards, forwards and send the functions. That's all this throttle is capable of doing. You'll notice that the sound from 1560 is still running. There's no emergency stop button on this throttle, which allows me to shut down the sound in that locomotive. It will run until the layout gets turned off and it won't start until when the layout gets turned back on until it gets some power. So let's dispatch this, here's the dispatch button. I will reach over here, I will unplug the throttle, the light goes out, I hold down the dispatch button, I plug it in, I get a dim red light, when I release it I get a bright red light. Now I know that I've dispatched the locomotive and it's no longer in the system. On the switching layout today, I'm gonna show you how the NCE cabs actually work from the perspective of an operator. Little vicarious hands-on experience here. Let's get started. Hi, we're gonna start off with the NCE ProCab, which is also the basis of the NCE's power cab. Now this layout has radio on it, so we have no wires connected to the ProCab and in fact there's just a little LED on the top of it. It's the only way you know that it's a radio cab because the antenna is internal to it. So we press the emergency stop button, kind of crazy, to turn it on and it goes through its cycle and it comes up and it says it's talking to locomotive number 1560, which is going forward at zero speed. The fast clock is at midnight and the set of lines underneath the 12 AM between there and the ProCab show that no functions are on that locomotive. So first, let's turn on a headlight. Function five turns on the headlight and function six turns on the rear light. And you see the five and the six appear there on the display. When I push the five and six buttons down here, they show up in the display so you can tell what you have happening. The speed control is in this area of the throttle. You have buttons and you have a knob and you notice how conveniently it sits in my hand and my thumb sits right on the speed knob. It's sitting here, it's powered up, the headlights are on but now to get it the sound of the locomotive starting up, I have to give it a little throttle. Let's weigh this one set up. There you hear it fire up, come up to speed and then you run it forward and stop and press the reverse, the direction button up here to reverse it. In this area of the throttle are the controls that you want to use most often. The horn, the momentary horn, the bell toggles on and off and the headlight control if you have your headlights on the normal function zero position. You can see the display up here is changing, okay, function one on and off when I blow the horn. It doesn't show function two coming on because it hasn't activated in the left function two on. If I come down here and I press the number two then the function two comes on and stays on so you have the availability of both a toggle on and off or a momentary control with the different buttons there. Another button that you'll use occasionally I like is the emergency stop, which will turn off the prime mover in the tsunamis the way it's configured. To select a loco with this throttle, you press the select loco button and it says up here enter loco and then you enter a number like one, two, three, four and then press the enter button and now it's talking to locomotive one, two, three, four. There's no requirement that you dispatch locomotives and there's also a recall stack here which will toggle through the last half dozen or so locomotives, there's only two on this one but it will go through as many as a half a dozen different locomotives that you've already programmed into the cap. If you're gonna throw turnouts on your layout you need to see how to do that. You come down here to the select accessory button you press it, you see the display comes up and says accessory number. So I'm gonna throw turnout number three so I press three and I press enter. Once I press that it says one is normal or two is reversed. So let's press two and the turnout through. Now if I wanted to go the other direction with that same turnout I press select accessory. It goes back to the same one accessory number three. I press enter, I press one and it throws it the other way. One thing we haven't discussed is this little button up here called momentum. This button when used with a locomotive that has a decoder that supports CV three and CV four acceleration and deceleration and programming on the main can be used to change the momentum setting in your locomotive at will. When the locomotive is stopped you press momentum and then you press one of the number buttons down here and the momentum will be set accordingly. If you press zero it will have zero momentum. If you press one it'll have a little bit. If you press nine it'll have a whole lot so much that you might even not even notice when it starts to move. But that's an option that's available for you on the power cab and the pro cab series from NCE. One other item that I particularly appreciate about the NCE pro cab is the fact that you can turn off the pro cab to save your batteries. You push this EXPN button down here at the bottom and it says what do you wanna do? You wanna set the timer, you wanna turn the cab off. One turns it off completely. Okay now that I have the cab off I can take it and put it in its holster and it will be ready to use the next operating session. I'm here on the test track now. Gonna show you a little bit about the pro cab from NCE and the power cab. Now what we have here is a power cab which is the same internals but it has a small command station and a small booster and it actually puts a couple of amps of power on the track. And in fact you'll see up here it actually reads out how much current is being drawn on the track right now. 0.18 amps is being delivered by this power cab to the track. We got a locomotive over here, an athern blue box that has a tsunami decoder in it but it's not making any sound. Why not? Well, here's the deal. I've got the sound turned off which happens with function eight but you notice there's no eight showing up up here. That's because this display only goes for light one, two, three, four, five, six. Function six is the last one that shows up here. You can see the six go on and off. So I have function eight activated but you can't tell the way the display works on this unit. Push function eight, the sound comes on. So we know that the sound is there but I'm gonna turn it off because it'll be a little distracting while we're demonstrating here. All right, so we wanna program with this. There's a program button down here in the corner, program escape it says. You press that and it comes up and it says we're gonna select the mode and right now it's selected programming on the main. Well, that's not what we wanna do. So let's press the program button again. Assign a local number to a cab. Nope, don't wanna do that. Set the system clock now. Right now I don't care. Use programming track. There we go, that's what I'm looking for. So I'll press the enter button. Now it says what kind of programming do you wanna do? Standard, CV, register. Let's go with standard. Now it's gonna go out and read the manufacturer's ID from the decoder in the locomotive that's sitting over here and it comes back and it says then now that's manufacturer 141 which is soundtracks. So I say okay by pressing enter then it goes out and reads the version of the decoder and it's version 64 which says that it's a tsunami but also says up here direct mode. It has determined that that from the data that was programmed into the power cab that soundtrack tsunamis the preferred method of programming is direct mode. So it sets that automatically. If this were a digit tracks decoder that prefers page mode it would have come up and said page mode. Okay so we press enter and it goes out and it says okay the active address is the long address do you wanna set up the address now? And I say yes so I press one. So it goes out and it reads the short address that's 40 which is what I want but supposing it had been something else I could have punched in the number 40 and let's change it to 45 okay. It's short address is 45. I press that now you wanna activate that address. No I want the long address. So one is yes for activating the address or enter is no so you press no. So now it goes out and it reads the long address and it comes up and says the long address is 2540. Well that's what's on the locomotive. That's what I want so I'm gonna press enter. Activate this address one for yes and there's no time out on that. You could spend 20 minutes before you press that button and it would still be sitting there waiting for your answer. Now do you wanna go on and set the configuration? No I wanna get out of it. Now that I've set the address so I come down here and I press the program escape button once takes us back to the choices and the second time we've escaped out we've got locomotive 2540 here on the track. Now you'll notice this is the same track. I haven't done anything. I haven't thrown any switches but now it's running it on the main. Okay back and forth on the same track that I just programmed on. The power cab switches automatically from this being a programming track to this being a test track. That's why I recommend it to most people for workbench use like this. This is down here, down here is my workbench and this is my test area above the workbench. Okay now here we have my favorite of the user's throttles or the little handheld throttles from NCE. This is the cab 06. You see the LED on the top that signifies that it's a radio version. You turn it on by pressing the horn button. Comes up and tells you what cab address it's on. It's on address 04 which is one of the 64 addresses available with the NCE system. So you press enter to let it know that you understood that then you press select you're gonna select a loco. I wanna select one, five, six, zero and press enter and it takes a few seconds and it comes back with this dot over the F which means it's going forward. So if your direction selection is this button here you see it shows forward and reverse right over here. Dog goes back and forth. Okay. Again, give it a little bit of throttle and it starts up. This is the encoder version of this cab that has an encoder that just goes round and round and round. The potentiometer version has a line on it which goes around 270 degrees of rotation. There are affection autos of both styles of throttle. NCE offers you either choice. You can have either one. You got the horn button here. Lights are controlled by five and six. There's no on this particular locomotive. There's no readout to show you that they are turned on or not. Now you'll notice there's a select button and then there's this shift escape button. The shift escape button is used for a lot of different things. So many so that you'd have to keep running back and forth the manual if you needed to but NCE thought of that and all of the uses of those buttons are shown on the back and what they do for you. So we power this guy up and away he goes. Hit the direction button and he stops and turns around and goes the other direction. Bell is on one. The short horn is on three. There we go. That's how we're working along. It's going in reverse. To throw a turnout takes a few more button presses over here. If you'll notice it says that shift select takes you to accessory. So I press shift select and it says we're in the accessory mode and I want to throw turnout three. So I press the three and I press the inner and I want to throw a number two and there it goes. It's thrown and it goes back to running the locomotive. Now during the timeframe that I was entering all of those key presses I would not have had control of the locomotive with the throttle up here. As far as the ergonomics go you see it fits nicely into my hand and you've got thumb control of the locomotive here. Okay to turn the radio off with this on the back here it says shift plus horn. What that means is you hold down the shift and press the horn at the same time and it says that it's going off and it's off. Okay there you have it. A little information about the NCE and about the Digitrax throttles and how they work and fit within your hands and how they talk to decoders in programming modes. Hope you enjoyed it. For more information see my column in the September and October 2012 editions of model railroad hobbyist magazine. Have fun, green boards, great railroading.