Welcome to the forum and the hobby! Personally I model in HO scale, but I've found the model railroading community (and RailPro specifically) to be extremely helpful regardless of scale.

Enjoy the journey. Building the railroad is every bit as rewarding as running the trains.

Posting my issue here to see what type of help I can get.  If you are part of the Railpro Users Group on Facebook, this is the same problem.

I attended my first show with the club I belong to (Arizona Big Train Operators or ABTO) and ran my train on both days I was there.  I was there Thursday from 9:30 to 12:30 and Friday all day.  I was just running the train on the setup along with other trains both days.  Thursday, there were two other Railpro users running (one had a HC-3-SUN like I did and the other had two HC-2).  Friday, I was the only Railpro user.  My HC-3-SUN hard locked two times on Thursday and one time on Friday.  Friday cause a minor pile-up with the other card on the track as the club typically runs two on the same track. 

Both days, I started around the same time, which was about 9:45am or so.  Thursday about 11am, the controller was unresponsive as I could slow/stop the train and the buttons did not due anything even though the direct radio indicator was "blue".  I couldn't even go to the home page.  This was strange as the other HC-3-SUN user had theirs lock up about 30 mins prior and had to hit the "reset" button (the button Railpro says do not use without Ring Engineering Support) to get it to come back.  I was able to use the "reset" button to be operational again.  Then it locked up again 30 minutes later on me.  Friday, the issue happened around 2pm.    The battery indicator looks to be okay (wasn't red) and again the direct radio indicator was okay (wasn't red).

Thursday evening, I looked to see if I was behind in my software and it says I have 1.13 loaded which seems to be the latest version for the HC-3-SUN. 

This was the first time I have ran the engine over an hour or so as this was my first event.  At home, I will only be running one train per leg but eventually I can see multiple trains running at the same time.  My concern is that I physical saw this happen on two different HC-3-SUN units, so I don't think both of our hardware is bad.  The HC-2 owner says he was fine all week, but did have a friend who have heard about the same issue and the only way to resolve it was using the "reset" button.

I am trying to work with Ring Support, but they are treating this as a hardware issue and would like to me to send it back to them to evaluate, but this seems more like a software issue based on my experience in IT.

Have anyone heard about this issue?

Advanced.

Hey Ken,

I recommend watching the following videos on YouTube from Larry Puckett. His design is far superior than my experience with RailPro's own PBM-2 and much cheaper to build. This is what I use.

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All parts are available on Amazon and the cost per unit to build is less than $10.

The two wires connect to the pads on the Decoder Buddy specifically for the keep-alive.

I put these on ALL my locos, especially my SW1500s. My locos NEVER stall, even on my unpowered frogs and my double crossover.

I use 5x 3.0V, 2F capacitors to get to 15V total. He uses only 4 capacitors so I don't think that would be enough for HO scale.

Rob

Did you use advanced or old style consisting - makes a difference