3 Truck Shay to wireless (dead rail)

[rdailey1202]

I have a 3 truck shay. The goal is dead rail with Airwire and having sound.

I have an available DG583S decoder and bought a Bachman "OEM" Soundtraxx card for this shay. I plan to use an Airwire Convrtr-60 with what ever I end up doing.

My question is, is the Bachman Soundtraxx card just for sound? I see left and right rail and motor connection points. But also a six pin connector on the other side of the card I have no info about the six pin plug. Can this card be used as a DCC decoder or is it just for sound and the six pin plug is specifically for a plugin to Bachman decoder. If there is a Bachman specific decoder can I buy one? I don't see it listed on the parts site but should look again I guess.

I'm trying to figure out from this list of stuff what to put together into a solution.

[the Bach-man]

Dear RD,
Please contact my very good friend Don Sweet of rcsofne:
https://www.rcsofne.com/
He will be happy to help!
Have fun!
the Bach-man

[rdailey1202]

Will do. Thank you!

[rdailey1202]

I did email Don so we'll see what his suggestions are.

Is it possible to purchase a Bachman Factory DCC decoder for the shay? One it was intended to have and work with the sound card I ordered just recently?

Its not in the parts list that I see.

[Kevin Strong]

The Bachmann DCC decoder that came with the Shay is a motor/sound decoder. It was manufactured by Soundtraxx specifically for the Bachmann Shay. It's based on the "Tsunami" sound system that Soundtraxx made, and you'll sometimes hear of the Shay's decoder referred to as the "Quasi-nami." It was a good (for its time) DCC decoder, though it could not handle track voltages north of 21 volts. Large scale DCC users tend to use track voltages between 20 - 24 volts, so the stock board was frequently removed and replaced by other boards. If you're running this decoder in a wireless environment, then you should be fine. The Shay runs quite well on 14.8 volts, so you'll be nowhere near pushing the decoder into over-voltage fault.

Here's a link to the list of CVs for the Shay decoder, from Soundtraxx's web site.

www.soundtraxx.com/factory/images/bachmann/pdf/fn3_3_truck_shay.pdf

Later,

K

[rdailey1202]

That's excellent, thank you.

Once I found the six pin plug on the factory pcb board plugging the decoder in became simple. The six pin connector on the decoder was throwing me because there is no mention of that on the Soundtraxx site, but being a custom part that makes sense.

Adding a speaker and the Airwire components should be simple at this point.

Thanks