Atlas S2 bell rate.

[central.vermont]

Has anyone tried to change the bell rate?
I would like to slow it down a bit.  Personally I think it is to fast a rate.
Jon

[woodone]

Need more information! Is this a factory installed decoder? Do you know who's decoder is being used? What scale?

[tehachapifan]

If you're talking about the N scale S2 with factory ESU decoder, you have a couple options. First option is to change the bell type (there are two and one is slower) and the second is change the bell rate. I found the default bell to be rather crackly sounding as well, so I changed mine to the second bell type by subtracting 64 from the value entered in CV48 (CV48 is 5 on mine now). This bell selection might not be correct for an Alco S2, but it is much cleaner and crisper sounding to me. I only played around a little with the second option and found it rather difficult to find a bell rate that still sounded good to me (changing the rate seemed to also change the tone).

[jdcolombo]

I agree with Russ.

Your best bet is to switch to the "Slow" bell.  CV48 on the LokSound controls the horn selection (0-15); the bell rate (0 for slow, 64 for fast), and can also select different prime movers when the file contains more than one (the EMD 567C file, for example, has two prime movers: one with manual transition and one with automatic transition; the Alco file for the S2, however, has only one prime mover.

If you read the value of CV48, it will probably be something above 64, depending on the horn selection.  Write the value down, do what Russ said (subtract 64), and then enter the new value in CV48.  You will have to cycle the power to the engine to get the new value to work correctly (e.g., take the engine off the track for a few seconds, or shut down track power for a few seconds).   

I've never been happy with trying to adjust the bell ring rate; as Russ points out, doing this also changes the tone of the bell.  You can probably do a LITTLE adjustment and be OK, but any major adjustment is likely to leave you unhappy.  I go with the slow bell on everything; it might not be prototypical, but it sounds better to my ears.

John C.

[central.vermont]

Thanks Russ and John, I'll probably mess with it tomorrow and let ya know what I get.

Jon

[tehachapifan]

Sounds good.

Oh, and in case you didn't know (I found out by happy accident), F6 illuminates the number boards on these units.

[central.vermont]

Sounds good.

Oh, and in case you didn't know (I found out by happy accident), F6 illuminates the number boards on these units.

Really, I can't seem to get anything to happen with F6?

[tehachapifan]

It does on mine, which is an undecorated unit with clear number boards so it's easy to see. Perhaps your unit has numbers in the board that cannot be backlit?

[AKNscale]

Some of these units didn't use the number boards. The one I just painted, ARR 7109 didn't use them at all in it's last scheme and yours may be the same.

[central.vermont]

Guess I  need to open the shell to see if there are any LED'S for this function. Russ, could you possibly get a picture of your board so I can compare it with mine.
Thanks, Jon

[AKNscale]

The LEDs should be there, they just might have blacked out the plastic lenses.

[tehachapifan]

The LEDs should be there, they just might have blacked out the plastic lenses.

Agreed. Can't see any reason why the LED arrangement or existence would be any different unit-to-unit in the "Gold" series, but I guess it's possible. Seems like your numberboard lenses must be blacked-out, unless a function key got disabled or remapped. There are two LED's on the front of the decoder board; one is on the top and one is on the bottom. The top light is for the numberboards and the bottom is for the headlight. I actually wish the LED arrangement was the opposite, as the LED for the headlight is not in-line with the headlight and a sharply-bent light tube was used to transfer the light to the headlight lens, which doesn't do a very good job IMHO. The top LED is in perfect alignment with the headlight and seems like it would have been a better choice, especially since numberboards don't need to be very bright, but I'm sure there were reasons for the current arrangement (edit: the numberboards are higher than the headlight, so that's probably why). I may actually try remapping these on mine to get a brighter headlight and go without the lighted numberboards....unless I can figure a different way to transfer the light to them from the bottom LED.

Update: I did remap the front LED's with the one on the top of the board set up for FO and then tested it with a substitute headlight lens from another model. There was not enough of an improvement to make it worthwhile, so I switched it back to the original arrangement.