Received a new Air Wire 8/28/06. Got it install 9/1/06. It is a hard one to figure out how to program if you never did one before. The instruction are not very clear, there are two books one for the decoder and one for the transmitter. The range is very good, I can run a train from about 60 feet away. I would have to jump the fence to get farther away. The only negative thing is motor hum, very bad at start up. Some people say this will hurt the motors and others say no it won’t. I e-mail Air Wire two times but no reply.

D or C {or designate};

Have you heard of this forum MAYBE help from within this group ?

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AirWire/

BTW I did not know decoders hummmmed ! But then I haven’t acquired any yet !!

Motors may hummmmm/chatter/grind but that is the engine manufacturer thing not R/C ??!

good luck,
doug c

Doug.

Some electronis speed controllers such as DCC and R/C etc can cause the motor to hum.
This is a result of the PWM frequency employed.

Depending on the hearing of the listener, anything under say about 8 KHz will be heard as a high pitched whistle ranging down the scale to a whine, then a hum, the lower the frequency gets.

The hum is not likely to do any damage to regular armature type motors.
However, at low frequencies, such as 100 Hz, you are advised against using PWM speed controllers with (so called) “coreless” DC motors such as made by Cannon and Faulhaber. Not many of these are used in LS. But there are some.

Most modern day DCC decoders and R/C speed controllers such as TE and RCS have a “silent” PWM frequency. RCS is 18 Khz and TE about 25 Khz. Well out of the audible range of the human ear.
Most people cannot hear sounds above 10-12 Khz.

If you burn energy you generate heat.
Depending on the design and operating frequency, PWM controllers generate the heat in both the motor and the speed controller. Some claim that the lower the frequency, the lower the heat.
Whereas Filtered linear DC controllers generate most of the heat at the power transistor.
Most PWM controllers will cause the motors to run at a higher temperature than will fully filtered linear DC controllers until they are running flat out. The FET type power transistors are then effectively simple ON-OFF switches that are fully on.

Keep your battery voltage to just a bit above the voltage required for a realistic top speed when flat out.
The equipment will run much cooler.