I have been playing with the programmer on Marklin locs with MFX decoders. It has been an experience, but I have figured out some cool things you can do to program the decoders.

One CAUTION...you can load the Marklin decoder information into the LokProgrammer, change every setting, even move sound slots from the 9-15 slots, that you would not be able to hear until you get the CS, down to one of the first 8 slots...BUT when you save the setting to disk, it does NOT save any of the sounds from the Marklin decoder. All of the functions and other settings are fine just not the sounds.

So I learned this the hard way.....My BR 53 no longer has any of the original sounds and the loksound site does not have any sounds for that loc. Now I am having fun creating my own sounds from various other sound files. You can also setup a different sound for a given function depending on the direction the train is moving.

Although you can reset the decoder with the MS, it restores everything to the factory setting except the sounds!

I have played with all of my MFX locs including the BR 53, BR 50, and the V 160 and they work fine with the lokprogrammer. On the other hand, the lokprogrammer does not see the decoder in the 37991 BigBoy as a valid decoder! So I will not be able to move the radio communications and the track clicking sounds down to the lower functions....

Has anyone else played with Marklin decoders on the lokprogrammer, if so I still have a number of questions that I have not figured out yet and I would be very interested in your experiences.

Thanks Ron, I wanted to get one of the Lok MFX decoders but they are about $200. I am going to wait and see what the Marklin MFX sound decoders go for before I jump. In the meantime, I just found 2 sounds in the V 160 that were not documented. One is a whistle that is on/off operated and the other is about a 10 second German station announcement. I have assigned two functions on the MS for them.

I wish I could download the Marklin sound files into the programmer so I could save the originals sound to a file that I could modify or reload to get everything back to the factory defaults. As long as I do not upload a new sound file to the Marklin decoder, I can play around and get everything back to normal. Before I start changing any settings I print off all of the screens that have the original settings.

The documentation is not very complete so I have to play around with various setting and see what happens. I figure out something new every time I play with the LokProgrammer.

Later..