Having had a lot of trouble myself with a DCS240, and long chains of
discussions here and with Digitrax, I'd suggest to you from bitter
experience:
1. Ensure that the DCS240 is at the latest firmware level, 0.3, Feb
28 2017. If it isn't, all sorts of stuff just doesn't work properly
(extended slots, loco functions, bad packets on the track, and index CV
programming were some of them).
2. Ensure that your DP/JMRI is 4.8 or above. There were changes in
this version specifically to deal with the oddities (not documented by
Digitrax) of the DCS240 programming process, and a couple of new
preferences that might help. These are Preferences/Roster/Programmer, and
took at the last two preference ticks. Allow Caching will improve
programming speed but should be used with extreme care and understanding:
if you don't have that, don't select it. Confirm CV writes will slow
down programming speed but will decrease the already small possibility of
errors. I run with neither selected, most of the time/
3. I find that programming operations with a CS240 work better when
a: the track power is turned on (it assists Loconet stability!!!!) and
also to have a Soundtraxx PTB100 in the mix. Some decoders (Loksound 4
are one) just program more reliably with DCS240 in this configuration, and
particularly when a PTB100 is in use.
4. If you get a 302 programmer busy error that won't go away (the
DCS240 programmer is prone to crashing), just power off the DCS240, wait
15 seconds and power on again to clear it, then repeat the DP operation.
5. Be patient. DCS240 read All Sheets takes about twice as long as
DCS100 on a decoder like a Tsunami-2 or Loksound 4 with lots of indexed
Cvs. Each read of one of these CVs takes one or two writes to the index
CVs before it can read, and the DCS240 takes forever to do a any sort of
CV write. The belief, undocumented by Big D, is that it does a read-check
on every write. That's what the Allow Caching change is for; it supresses
the Index writes by DP if DP thinks that the index CV is already set
correctly. This is OK ***only*** if the decoder does not change the index
CV while reading or writing, If you don't know this for certain, don't
use this new preference.
I use a Locobuffer/Loconet connection (see item 3 above). I have used the
USB connection option, and found that has its own quirks, but as I've not
used it recently, I can't recall what they are, but I do recall that it
also wasn't trouble-free,
Mick
______________________________________________________________________
Mick Moignard
Specialising in DCC Sound
p: +44 7774 652504
e: mick@...
skype: mickmoignard
IBM Notes and Domino: still has what it takes as an App Dev and
Collaboration platform.
