could power all your frogs quite easily. No more problems
with short wheelbase locos or sound unit sound cutting out at
dead frogs.
Meanwhile, developments in super-capacitor miniaturiza-
tion have allowed the DCC manufacturers to develop practical
keep-alive circuits for DCC decoders. Now it’s possible to have
a decoder keep-alive circuit that keeps your loco running over
a dead section for several seconds, sometimes as much as
5-10 seconds!
To see this in action, check out Bruce Petrarca’s DCC column
in the March 2013 issue of MRH. The video in this column
shows the keep-alive in action as Bruce removes the loco
from the track and lets it keep running for several seconds
while off the track!
So this begs the question – which of these approaches are
better? If I have keep-alive in my locos, I clearly don’t need
frog juicers too. And if all my frogs are powered, my track will
MRH-Dec 2014
