So I have a new mLD3 decoder and I am setting up an ex-Hamo Re460, which now has a 5 pole DCM.. These are the motor options in the MDecoderTool3



Options 1, 3 and 4 seem to be Softdrive Sinus, Big C-Sine and the Bell shaped armature motors..

What is DC soft and DC hard?

What is the one to use with a 5 Pole DCM?

How do I add a loco image to the decoder?

Seriously challenging to use..

One of the nice things with ESU is the volume of documentation - the MDecoderTool seems to have been developed by the German Secret Service (only the Russians have the full manual )

Ah, I went through this recently with a soft drive sine loco, and clapcott was invaluable in helping me through.

Option 3 of the C90 is the five pole high efficiency motor that you have fitted. The five pole motor was introduced in the nineties along with the C90 decoder, which was the first generation to have load compensation and acceleration and braking delay.

It does matter in some respects, as selecting to motor type puts the decoder in the correct range to begin driving the loco in order to calibrate. It is important to get things set correctly, particularly with soft drive sine, because if you leave it on the factory default in the case of a sine motor, it simply won't run.

Anyway, try option 3, hope my rant helps.

Cheers....

Mike

Thanks guys.. I will try option 3.. I am just working out some LED replacements for the loco..

Some documentation for the mSD/3 decoder tool would be great, but I am not holding my breath. I had no clue about which motor type to choose when I upgraded my first DCM loco with an mSD/3 . Luckily there were a series of articles in the Märklin Magazine a few years ago about upgrading older locos which went into reasonable detail about this process, but of course it left some questions unanswered. It is the Märklin way.

According to that article option 3 is indeed the correct choice for a DCM powered loco. I have used that setting and done a calibration run on all of my DCM upgrades with an mSD/3 and the running results are very good.

Good luck with your upgrade and let us know how it all goes.

The English version is not made by Märklin, it’s a cleaned up google translate of the German version.
Ref: https://www.marklin-user...t34667-Decodertool-mDT-3

But bottom line is, that the documentation provided by Märklin, just barely cover the basics. Fore everything else it’s mostly trial and error. And trying to piece together information form other sources.

That is exactly the situation. The decoder tool is free and very capable, but not what I would call intuitive in use and there is no documentation beyond "push the power button" basics. I tend to just figure it out as I go along and I have mastered most of the use of that tool although there are a few unsolved mysteries still out there for me. Thanks for that link to the V3 doc David - I will take a look at that soon.

I write software for a living and to write software you have to use a lot of other software in the process. I use some amazingly rich development environments (MS C# for instance) which are actually easier to navigate because they are so well documented. They also have vibrant online communities of developers who help each other figure out some amazingly abstract stuff, by sharing our solutions to problems. We have only a few online Märklin venues and the advice is dependant upon the knowledge and discoveries of individual users because Märklin leaves so much of it a mystery.

But here we all are in the MRR world and we love Märklin and we even respect their digital devices. But without proper documentation no one gets the full potential from what is actually some prettys sophisticated stuff, which is wrong. Managers generally make those decisions and I imagine that Märklin developers are also frustrated by the lack of end user documentation. Of course they don't want to actually write the docs themselves and taking time to explain it all to technical writers takes time away from fixing bugs and adding new features. It is the same thing but on different scales everywhere that I have worked, but Märklin's user docs stand out as leaving much to be desired when they even exist at all.

Now let's get back to enjoying these lovely machines, which is the real attraction of this hobby after all. We will solve the mysteries of Märklin digital together or we will fail. But we should all still be marveling at the beauty of these precise and detailed models.