Lok Sound V5

 Hello Folks - hope everyone had an enjoyable Christmas , given the pandemic restrictions and all - hopefully things will be back to normal by next Christmas. I received a Lok Sound 21 PIN V5 decoder as part of my Christmas and today I installed it in my new Athearn Genesis Maine Central GP7 that I blogged about back on 20 Nov. It was a easy install, as I had already installed a Lok Sound sugar cube speaker in the model a few weeks back in anticipation of this decoder install. The speaker was soldered to the existing Athearn mother board as it has speaker terminals installed on it. The speaker itself was installed under the short hood - it has two piece weight located there and as luck would have it, the upper piece (which is the smaller piece ) is able to be removed without disturbing the main lower weight. This created enough room for the speaker which I epoxied in place. So I took the new decoder and before installing , I updated the firm wear and then installed the correct 567 prime mover sound package that I downloaded a few weeks ago ( and modified a few things such as road # , etc). I did this by connecting the Lok Tester to my Lok Programmer. As I mentioned in a previous post, it is neat to be able to do all this before installing a decoder to ensure that everything is working correctly. Once that was done, it was a simple matter of removing the loco shell , removing the TCS EU621 non sound decoder that I had previously installed and plug in the new ESU 21 pin decoder and it was ready to go. The loco was then put on my layout and given a test run - sounds and performs great!. I will do some fine tuning , such as selecting the correct horn, bell and some other minor things, but the loco is ready for service!! Happy New Year folks and lets all hope for a much better 2021 -we all deserve it!!!!

21 PIN Lok Sound V5 decoder

Decoder Installed

Loco interior showing Lok Sound Sugar Cube and V5 decoder