Sometimes you Win, Sometimes...

...you have to fix what you lost!

Most of you who follow the blog know that I'm running a PowerPro 5-amp system with a second booster unit for my HO scale railroad. I have 6 EB-1 circuit breakers, three on each booster unit, that until this weekend were working perfectly. Since all 6 need the same settings, I never changed the factory-set stationary decoder address of 2044 (which, by the way, is not an address I use on the model railroad for any locomotive).

This weekend during an operating session, the EB-1's all stopped tripping, and therefore the boosters themselves would trip when there was a short.

In troubleshooting, I realized that I had never removed the 'SETUP' shunt on any of the EB-1's, which is explicitly mentioned in the directions.  For two years, it was no problem, due to simple programming that did not affect the CV's that control EB-1's.  Recently, however, I have installed the JMRI software to assist in programming and to control the detection and signal system.  JMRI allows speed matching of locomotives as well, a huge asset with a locomotive fleet as varied as mine.  While it is simple to do this on the computer in JMRI, the computer is actually doing quite a bit of CV programming in the background...including several that affect the EB-1's when the SETUP jumper is left installed.  In effect, I had reprogrammed my EB-1's, and they no longer worked!

I did attempt to follow the directions and do a factory reset per the instructions, which had no effect.  I even called NCE and asked for advice, and even their advice to enable the manual reset had no effect.   It was time to bite the bullet and order 6 new EB-1's for the railroad.

Long story short - FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS!  Some days are diamonds, and some days...well, they're rocks.

~RGDave