September 28, 1999

DT100IR Steals What?

Most of the Digitrax components we have been using are older revisions. I decided to try a new DT100IR in tethered mode, without battery, and was surprised when I was unable to steal a loco by the prescribed methods!

After experimenting for a while this is what I discovered:

(A) A brand new, out of the box, DT100IR will only steal a loco with the
battery installed!

(B) Once "conditioned" with the battery as in (A) the throttle, without
battery, will steal, but not consistently! Sometime it will steal the requested address, sometime it will steal a previously requested address and sometime it will not steal at all.

(C) When there was a successful steal the status codes were wrong.

There were more strange iterations that I did not document. I tried four new throttles with same result. I conveyed this dilemma to the Digitrax folks a while ago. I am sure they are also looking at the problem. If anyone has the time, perhaps you can try to document this further?