 Hi, I'm George Bogotov from Soundtracks and What's Neat for March starts right now. This is What's Neat for March 2017. I'm your host Ken Patterson and this month we've got a pretty good show. First of all, George Bogotov from Soundtracks stops by and puts us through the paces and shows us everything about the new Sonami 2 decoders that are available on the market. He shows us this month's esteemed decoder and how to set it up and how it operates and how to properly actually run a train using all the functions that the decoder has to offer. It's a pretty lengthy and very informative segment this month on What's Neat. Also, James Wright stops by and shows us and explains to us the success that he has had with his YouTube site where he does product reviews of various manufacturers products in the industry and pretty much just shows us what's in the box. He's had great success with this YouTube channel and we interview him this month for What's Neat. Also, we look at the new Woodland Scenics LED lights system. I'm extremely excited about this. I worked it into my Warf scene on the layout and I'll take you step by step through the process of installing the lights on a layout. Plus, I also look at what it is that's inside these devices that creates a wonderful filtered current that our LED lights love to eat. Also this month, I want to say that I found an article in the November and December 2016 of Narrow Gauge Gazette where James Jim Vale did the lift out section that we featured on the show with using magnets to make a lift out section. I think that was last June 2016 that we ran that video and Jim gives us credit in the article. Thank you very much, but it's really neat to see how what's neat is influencing some of the material that we see in the model press. When I was looking through my HON3 annual for 2016, not the fact that I've got a really cool ad photo on the back that I really like, but I also found this ad that Woodland Scenics produced featuring their lighting system, their just plug lighting system. And I've got to tell you this is just an absolutely beautiful ad. If I were to give out the best ad photo award for 2016, Woodland Scenics would get it with this ad because just what a dynamite beautiful setup. And speaking of ads, I do want to say on a personal note to the manufacturers out there that watch what's neat, I've got a couple opening slots in my schedule and I'm looking to add a few more clients to my monthly work that I do shooting model railroad ad photos and selling great product. It's advertising and I got to tell you what, advertising is all about connecting to the consumer. In this industry, it's about the imagination of the consumer. It has no budget and it has no limit on time. When you tap into that imagination, your ad can run all day in the minds of the modeler. I know the path and the process to get you to that path, as my ad shots capture the imagination of modelers every day. And I have sold millions of dollars in model railroad product through my photography and now my latest is video. So if you'd like to talk to me about that on a personal note, contact me through my email address kensart1 at msn.com and I'll be happy to discuss how I work and I think you're going to be very happy with the end result of more sales of your product. And with that, let's continue on with this month's What's Neat? For this segment of What's Neat, we're going to look at the new technology in HO scale offered to us modelers now of LED lights. And it's HO, O scale, N scale, all scales. This applies to all scales this month. And LED lights have finally come to the modeler through a new system that Woodland Scenics has introduced called the Just Plug System. And I've made a bit of an investment in that because I'd like to light up my Warf scene and actually all parts of this layout using these new LEDs because the track record that we've discovered so far with LEDs is they seem to last forever. And for years I used the old German beautiful lamps on the Midwest Valley modelers layout and it just became a fact of life that about every six to eight months I would have to go through the layout and replace all the old burnt out light bulbs. And the new LEDs should eliminate that problem for us on our layouts. In fact, the way the Woodland Scenics system is designed, I know this for a fact after looking into it that this is going to give us good filter power for our lights. So let me show you a little bit about what I went into on this. First of all, my experience with LEDs is they usually light up at about between two and three volts. And so I thought I was going to be a know-it-all on this project and be able to just simply wire up these lights to a DC power system of about two to three volts and run my layout on it. And I verified this by hooking up a power pack, a rheostat train power pack, to the lights. And I discovered that as I turned the power pack knob up, the light started to light just around almost two volts. I then verified this fact with two DC batteries. And I connected those to the LED Woodland Scenics light. And sure enough, it lit just fine with three volts from two batteries. But the more I looked into the system, and the more I discovered about a lot of the thought and the electronics that are actually inside the light bulb system, I've decided against wiring directly and instead using the Woodland Scenics system the way it is designed to be used. And I'm going to explain that a little bit further here next. First of all, I've got a bunch of lights here. And I want to explain to you what I've got. I've got the double lamp post lights. I've got arched cast iron lights. I picked up some wooden pole lights, which I think will look really good in the Warf scene. I also picked up some metal modern looking lights. And then some single lamp lamp posts that look really nice. And I also picked up some goose neck lamps that are attached to the side of the building. So that that'll be another feature. And I've also got interior lights where we can light up the inside of the buildings using the Woodland Scenics interior lights that they've already got pre-wired for us. And basically how the system works, and I'm going to show it to you here what I've got hooked up here. The system runs off of an AC power supply. And I've got the power supply connected into this light hub, which has got four potentiometers on it, which will allow us to adjust the lighting value of each set of lights. So I've got the Woodland Scenics AC power system plugged into the light hub right now. And all I've got to do is plug in the lights into these jacks that are controlled with the potentiometers. And you can see this interior lighting lights up real nice. This is this light right here. And then to adjust the lighting, I turn the potentiometer with a screwdriver and I can adjust it bright or dim. I like that feature, especially for lighting the inside of buildings so that the light doesn't actually protrude through the cracks in the corners of the building. Here's a regular street lamp. This is a goose neck lamp that I've got and I'm going to plug that into the system here. And as you can see, this lights up real nice. Now, let me explain to you a little bit about what they've done with regards to the design on this system. I looked at the light hub here and as I said, it's got a power supply of AC power going into it, supplying a good 18.3 volts into the light hub of AC. The more I looked into the light hub itself, I avoided my warranty so you don't have to by looking at the inside of this. And I discovered that there's a capacitor in there and a rectifier in there. A lot of electronics that filter the current to our lights. What the capacitor and actually what the rectifier does is it converts the AC power from this power pack to a nice smooth DC current of about 16 volts. And I verified that by using the meter on that. I then further followed up with the meter and I wanted to find out what the voltage was that was being fed to the lamp itself. And it turned out that this was about 3.1 volts. Very filtered, very clean current. And that is because on the end of each one of the lighting terminals here, there is a capacitor built or not a capacitor, a resistor built into this so that it converts the power from 16 volts DC down to just around 3.1 volts. So it's going to be a very smooth filtered current which will ensure the fact that these light bulbs are going to last a lot longer. Now, this unit, you can hook up 3 lights per hub which allows me to connect 12 lights to the system. If I want to add more, what I do is I take something called the expansion hub and I plug my power system into that. And then what I would do is I would daisy chain from this to the light hub and I can add 1, 2, 3, 4 more light hubs to the expansion hub which means that the end result is I could power 48 light bulbs by adding four more of these to the system. So I can see by daisy chaining this and making it work as per the instructions and I'll show you the instruction sheet here which illustrates exactly what I'm talking about the daisy chaining of the system. We could add as many lights as we want as long as we don't exceed the 1,000 milliamps that the AC power supply puts out. And each one of the boxes of bulbs are clearly marked with how many milliamps, 30 for example, with this one that each set takes. So it's easy to figure the math on that. So at this point what I need to do is figure out how to install all of this into a modular layout which is what mine is and my layout is designed whereas I've got to be able to take it outside. So I've got to set this whole system up where I can take it outside, unhook things very quickly but yet still be able to wire everything up the way it's supposed to. And I've made a cross section of my layout here to illustrate this how I think I'm going to connect this up to the warp scene on the layout. I'm going to put my expansion hub in the bottom and the reason for that is I can plug my AC power supply directly into that, unplug it and just remove the entire module from the area of the location where it is with a simple plug of the AC power supply. Once I get the power into the expansion hub I'm going to run the wires up to the light hub whereas I'll then have power to this. Now my diorama is built on a three-quarter inch piece of plywood which is represented by this small piece of wood right here. As I take the diorama up out of the home module I'll then have access to the light hub. I'll be able to wire all of my lights up to 12 on this one and if I add two 24 lights all the way across and then I'll be able to put the diorama right back on top of the light hub which will be carved out into the phone. That way everything's self-contained. I can still take my modules outside for photography but yet I've got the entire light hub system worked into it the way it's meant to be so that I'll ensure that I'll have filtered smooth current to all of my light bulbs which would mean longevity, great longevity with these lights. So at this point what I need to do is I need to go over to the layout and because the diorama is built on a piece of plywood I can easily lift that up out of the layout put it somewhere safe and then I'm going to unplug everything and undo all the track and pull out the entire module of the layout so that I can get to it from all three sides as I install and cut and wire this up. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to wire this up but let's kind of look follow with me on the next you know a few steps of this process it should be easy it should be quick it's just a matter of drilling holes into the plywood installing the lights wiring everything up to the hubs very quickly and it should be a very dramatic result on the diorama so let's do this let's dig into it and let's see what happens next for the install process of this on my foam removable layout I started this project on the wood dock this part of the water scene is not removable I made marks with a pencil where the lights will be installed working my way along the dock until I had seven light placement locations evenly spaced using a 3 32 inch drill bit I drilled seven holes through the wood planks and the plexiglass sub base that make up the dock using a 10 inch long 3 16 inch drill bit I drilled horizontally through the foam under the dock and the railroad tracks creating a channel to run wires I pushed a 1 eighth inch diameter brass tube through this hole that will act as a temporary conduit to feed the wires through the woodland scenic lights come with a generous length of wire attached measuring over three feet long I had fed the light wires through the wood dock and then through the brass tube where it will converge with the light hubs underneath all the buildings simply pull out the brass tube and the wire stays in the foam where we want it to be I took my time on this working my way along the dock installing and running the wires through the scene until I had seven lights installed along the dock this is the auxiliary switch for the just plugged lighting system it connects to the hubs by removing the control port wire and plugging the switches wire lead into the control port this gives us an on and off control of the lights when everything is installed into the layout the rocker switch matches the ones I already used to control my blocks on my layout so I decided to disassemble this one removing the rocker switch from the housing and finding a place to mount this switch on the side of my layout I drilled a three-quarter inch hole through my oak fascia and installed the woodland scenic rocker switch into this hole by simply pressing it firmly into place with my thumbs looking at the layout from underneath I used a sharpie to draw a square where the light hubs will be installed I also drew a line from the auxiliary switch location to the square where I will run the wires using a box knife I cut a slot into the bottom of the foam where the wires will run to the hubs I used a screwdriver to press the wires up into this slot embedding the wires permanently into the foam I used a hot foam cutter to cut a hole in the foam where the wires and the light hubs will be installed I also cut a hole in my plywood tabletop to match the same area where the hole was cut into the foam I used gorilla glue to attach two light hubs side by side on a piece of plywood the expansion hub was also attached to its own piece of quarter inch oak setting this aside until the glue cured the two light hubs will be glued flush into the foam facing down whereas I will have access from underneath the layout to adjust the potentiometers with a long screwdriver when it comes time to set the lighting's brightness using a hot foam cutter under the layout I cut an additional space to install the expansion hub facing up flush with the bottom of the layout after the glue cured I plug the ac transformer into the expansion hub along with the rocker switch connecting plug and two connecting cables that will run to each of the light hubs I plug the connecting cables into each of the two light hubs I twisted the fine wires grouping three lights at a time and inserted these wires into the linker plugs supplied with the lights simply press down the buttons and insert the wires into the plugs matching the color coded polarity of red and black the linker plug wires get inserted into one of the four light hubs power output jacks pressing these in firmly to ensure a good connection and just like that the warf dock lights are done to test our progress up to this point I pressed the rocker switch and the lights turned on giving a nice even glow on the scene so far so good everything works and now it's time to light the buildings and the areas on the lift out part of the diorama I inserted the module back into the layout at this time as we now have access to the light hubs from underneath the layout and on top for the rest of this installation process turning my attention to the lift out section of the warf scene that holds the entire bts hide pulp milk kit I used a sharpie to mark the placement of each lamp post now because I am planning to convert this complex of models into restaurants art galleries gift shops I plan to use a variety of different style lights on this scene and I had that fresh in my mind when deciding the location of each light using a 3 32 inch drill bit I drilled eight holes through the three-quarter inch plywood base to accept these lamps I also drilled one half inch holes in the scene to feed the wires up into the buildings I took this opportunity to vacuum the scene with the help of a paint brush to help loosen up the dust I fed the lights wires through the small holes pressing the lamps into place the light posts are not brittle and in fact can be bent just a little to keep them vertical and square to the scene I drilled three 32 inch holes into the freight house using a pin vice in two locations on the structure I then fed the wires for the goose neck lamps through these holes and glued this into place with CA glue I placed one of the woodland scenics interior LED lights into the freight house sticking it to an interior wall so that the light would be cast on both floors of the structure I then pulled the wires from the buildings through the bottom holes in the diorama keeping them straight and separate as to be organized in groups for the next step in this process I twisted the lights wires into groups of three as before and inserting these matching the polarity by color red to red and black to black into the linker plugs until all the lights were wired creating a total of five sets of wires with plastic jacks on the end which will be then plugged into the light hubs installed into the foam diorama I set the diorama with all the buildings on top about nine inches above the scene providing safe access underneath to plug in all the jacks into place and stuff the wires into the hole in the foam I plugged the five wired jacks into the open hubs that remained on our light hubs one at a time making sure that they clicked when pressed in just to ensure good conductivity of power for our diorama I then turned on the lights making sure everyone worked and they did the gooseneck lamps the interior lights all the lamps had an even glow to them which I could then adjust with the pententiometers underneath at this point I felt a great sense of accomplishment as everything has gone pretty smooth so far on this project I lowered the diorama back into the warf scene making sure everything fit perfect and it did a few days later I did add an additional light hub underneath the diorama and adding a few more lights on the road that runs parallel to the yards a truck approach tracks with that the warf has a whole new atmosphere created by these amazing new led lights from woodland scenics I now plan to install these lights on my entire layout over the next year or so as the finished effect is simply magic someone at woodland scenics deserves a raise because this lighting system is a real winner it's stunning in fact and that's this segment of layout construction on what's neat for this segment of what's neat I've got James Wright who's driven all the way from Omaha, Nebraska to film a little bit of behind the scenes of what occurs around here but James you've got something that's really interesting to all of us and that's the fact that you've got this YouTube channel where you open up new products and sort of an expose of what's in the box can you tell us a little bit what motivated you to do that and how's that working out for you well my first experience with YouTube was just sending my cousin videos as I started in the hobby so I literally started YouTube at the same time I started in the hobby in mid 2009 and then I noticed that every item I was purchasing nobody had done a review on and I came from car reviews worked with a friend to do some car reviews with CNET and I decided well people need to know what's going on because these products are fairly expensive so everything I bought I started giving my thoughts on and that just kind of took hold and grew along with my how-to series on YouTube and also the other things I do on YouTube like railfanning and things like that so are you now developing a layout or is this getting you more into the hobby just doing these videos well I consider the videos part of the hobby now it's actually kind of robbing time from where I would spend a lot of focused time on areas of my layout I quickly put up a layout because my my job and move every couple of years so I want to get a layout quickly done which means the quality isn't that well but it's modular kind of like yours here Ken just quickly thrown up so I can actually run trains and enjoy it a little while before I'm off to the next location how many videos do you make about every year now I know I've averaged about six or seven a month so this is a lot of work yeah so you're looking at 80 plus a year okay well boy I tell you what we sure enjoy looking at them I know that it's a lot of work and there's a lot of dedication involved but just keep doing it keep doing us tell us what website what is the letters that we need to put into YouTube in order to get to your YouTube site so when I started I didn't really think about this to make it catchy so it's just my initials in the year I graduated high school so it's youtube.com forward slash jlwii 2000 okay there you go we'll put that at the bottom of the screen but I want to thank you very much for coming by here and wish you the best of luck with all the videos we're going to be watching what you do thanks Ken you got an amazing layout here cool thank you for this segment of What's Neat I've got George Bogatuck from Durango Colorado from Soundtracks to tell us the magic and the fun of all these new tsunami 2 decoders that have recently come out so George is here today to give us a little demo and show us the nuts and bolts of the tsunami system George welcome how you doing well as you can see we've got a wide range of locomotives sitting here in front of us and all of these are quick with tsunami 2 we're going to talk about a lot of the specific features and a lot of the cool things that we've built into the decoder to try to help make it more realistic and more fun for you so let's get started so first we're going to talk about steam decoders and we're going to show you some of the cool things that we've done with the decoder first off in the previous generation we had a lot of different sounds that were grouped by what the decoder was you had light steam, medium steam, heavy steam and so on now we've grouped all that together and put it into a single decoder called steam and you can select the different exhaust chuffs the different whistles the different bells to match your prototype you don't have to spend hours in front of a computer downloading sounds to make this match so for example the steam decoder is fit in all three of these locomotives and you can see there's a wide range of different locomotives to choose from we've got a small American 440 that's a wood burning locomotive there's no steam dynamo so there's no electric power so we've got different lighting effects that you can do an oil burning headlight we've got this fairly large medium steam engine there we've got different exhaust chuffs different whistles to choose from different bells and this has a light dynamo and then we've got the heavy articulated with a big heavy whistle articulated exhaust chuff different bells again and this one's an oil burning with an atomizer this one would be a coal burning with an auger and this of course like I mentioned was the wood burning so you've got all these choices built into the decoder you can also select between a lifting or a non-lifting type injector you can select between a manual Johnson bar or a power reverse so we've put a lot of features in there and that's just sound selection once we get into the actual operation you'll see how we've really improved the decoder over the previous generation all right so now we're going to show you how to set some of the basic parameters up and choose some different sound effects and get your locomotive fine-tuned to the locomotive that you put the decoder into so first let's pick an exhaust chuff so we're going to move this it's actually a pretty good exhaust chuff but for let's take a listen and see what other ones are out there there's a nice loud bark that seems to be a more subtle and all I'm doing is changing the value and see being 123 we'll go ahead and use that one now we need to pick our whistle this is really the signature signature of the model of the locomotive this is what you hear the most and is the most dominant feature that one's pretty good but let's see what else we can find and right now I'm just programming CB120 and there's a list that you can find on our website at soundtracks.com under the manuals tab there's a full itemized list of all this sound roster that's pre-programmed in this decoder so that you can go in and find which one matches or which one you like so I'm just going to pick some random values here so we'll try that one's a pretty good one oh and let's move on good one we'll use that one you have 63 whistles to choose from you have a collection of single chime three chime five chime and six chime to choose from and there's a full roster of them like as I mentioned on our website at soundtracks.com so the next one we'll pick is our bell and there's a variety of bells programmed into it on the tsunami 2 you get 12 different bells to choose from and different ring rates so you can have a hand rung bell or you can have an air ringer so let's see what we can find first one I chose so let's put that back on here there's a good nice medium tone bell that's set up as a rare air ringer so you can see how easy it is to choose and to select the decoder the sounds to match the model that you're running in so next up we're going to program some DDE some dynamic digital exhaust all right and the next thing we're going to do is we're going to set up our dynamic digital exhaust or DDE dynamic digital exhaust alters the way that the exhaust sound is played so that it sounds more like the locomotive is working and what we're going to do is we're going to set up some auto calibration CVs so that the decoder will do the work for us automatically so we don't have to push buttons or dial a knob or anything else that we need to do to have the sound change and it's very simple we're going to program three CVs we're going to program CV 2.503 and we're going to program that to a value of 255 when the locomotive is moving at speed step one this is going to establish the initial amount of energy that the motor takes to move the locomotive light on flat level track then we're going to set CV 2.504 and we're going to set that when the locomotive is running at about speed step 20 and the idea is that we're creating a two-point speed table that the decoder knows how much energy it takes to keep that motor moving on light and on flat level track so that when the decoder or when the locomotive is pulling a heavy freight train or it encounters a grade or starts descending a grade the VDE processor will know that the motor is using more or less energy and will adjust the chuff sound accordingly so let's show you how to do this real quick so we're going to start moving our locomotive forward at speed step one now we're going to program CV 2.503 and to do this we're going to program CV 32 to a value of two and that is the two dot part of the CV so we're going to go ahead and program CV 32 to a value of two now with our cab we're going to program CV 503 as we normally would and we're going to set this to a value of 255 and the decoder is going to auto-calibrate the amount of power that it needs at this that's it we're done so now we can stop the locomotive now to do the other point as I mentioned we're going to have this locomotive moving at about speed step 20 on flat level track so first thing we want to do is let's go ahead and get the locomotive moving but since we should only have a short place of track here we're going to go ahead and hold it for a second CV 04 to a value of 255 but I haven't pressed the enter button yet we're going to let it ride we're going to stop the locomotive now the decoder knows how much energy it takes to move at the two speed steps so internally it's created a graph to determine how fast it how how much power needs to be applied to the motor at very beginning of the movement and somewhere around the middle so it creates a chart now we're going to set the sensitivity and this is the sensitivity is going to determine how sensitive it is to changes in the load that means when you encounter a grade you can determine how much the DDE processor is going to change the chuff you can determine how little it's going to and that's really something that is up to you to decide you can play with it and see how you like it there's no wrong answer here so just to get started here I'm going to program CV 2.512 and since CV 32 is already set to 2 all I need to do is program CV 512 and I'm going to set that to say around 35 it's a fairly low sensitivity you have a range from 0 to 255 but let's start it out here and see how it works the next thing we need to do is add a little bit of momentum and this is just saying how long it takes the locomotive to get to the command and speed steps basically simulating the heavy train behind it so we're just going to use some nominal values so we're going to program CV 3 to a value of 25 and then CV 4 to a value of 75 and this just gives you some basic nominal values so let's move in reverse we'll go to speed step 10 you can kind of hear how that chuff was a little bit more labored at the beginning but then it's settled in fairly steady as you're running it even and we cut our throttle you hear the chuff back off as it coasts to a stop one of the cool features that's built into the tsunami decoders is the application of brakes in the real world the locomotive itself has brake shoes that will press against the wheels to slow the train to a stop when it's tied into a train you have those thousands of tons behind it and using the brake shoes on the locomotive would wear out quickly if you were using that to stop the train so the tsunami 2 actually does implement the second braking called automatic or train brake and that uses the shoes on the freight cars to slow the train down so that again you're not wearing the brake shoes on the locomotive so let's set both of these up so using our momentum we put a little bit of momentum into the locomotive to sit you know take a little bit of time to get to the commanded speed step now in cv 117 and 118 you can set the braking rate for the independent and you can set the braking rate for the automatic what i like to do is use the independent to stop the locomotive more quickly so i can use that during my switching moves back and forth use the independent then once i build my train you use f12 to toggle into train brake mode and you'll hear the compressor cycle as it's charging the train line on the cars behind it and then once you do once the train line is charged up and ready to go you release the brakes and start to move you'll hear the sounds that are associated with the automatic brakes and you can now implement the second braking rate which i like to do a little bit longer to simulate the heavier cars behind it so let's see it in action all right so let's release the brakes right now we're moving forward at speed step 10 but our independent brakes are set so we're going to release the brakes you hear the bail off you hear the dde kick in as it works a little harder to get started we'll apply the brakes bring the locomotive to a stop change directions now we're going to go pick up this car over here and the one thing you can do is you can feather the brake on and off so you can toggle the f11 on and off so that you can do a perfect couple every time here we are we're tied in so we're going to toggle the f12 and this car is also equipped with a sound car so we're going to show you a neat little trick we're going to release the handbrakes on the car and we're going to tie it into our train using f8 four times using the intelligent consisting so you hear the retainers bleed off you hear the brake set now our compressor is done cycling it's not charging the train anymore we're ready to go now when i release the brakes the locomotive and the car are going to accelerate at the same rate and when i apply the brakes on the locomotive you're going to hear the squeal coming from the car this time you see how that works that's pretty cool so now we're going to show you how much fun you can have we're going to take this up challenger and we're going to get it started the proper way so let's see how this works so first thing we want to do we've got our lights on so we're ready to go we're going to blow our whistle signal going to turn on our cylinder cocks close the cylinder cocks turn off the bell hear how the articulated chuff is playing you'll get the sound of the two sets of drivers going in and out of sync with each other brake crossing all right so now we're going to take our steam engine and we're going to get this train started and you're going to see the dde kick in we're going to use our brakes and we're going to use our whistle signals as we cross the crossing so we're going to put all this together and show you how adding tsunami two can add that much more fun to your railroad so here we go