Over the last few days I've had a bit of a purge on some of the older DCC decoders in various models and carried out a few new installations. As I've been using DCC for over 6 years now some of my original chips were looking a little lightweight in the features department, plus operating experience has shown me which products best suit my requirements. All of the locos shown have had chip upgrades and a whole pile of Roco and Digitrax decoders have been binned, along with a handful of older Lenz examples. All locos now run with only Lenz, Zimo or LokSound decoders.
The high proportion of US locos here is because that's what I was modelling when I first converted to DCC and they contain the oldest decoders. Few had even had their details fitted by the time I switched back to UK modelling, as unfortunately the photo shows only too well. I might fit a lot of these parts over the next week or so, but deep down I know I should leave it until I've upgraded the lighting circuits, otherwise delicate parts may get broken during handling. The more comprehensive lighting facilities on modern decoders was the main reason for the upgrades, running qualities of the older chips were more than satisfactory.
Talking of running qualities, the Stewart F3 on the left is the smoothest loco I've ever owned, bar none. It has thus had one of the excellent Zimo decoders fitted, but ironically this hasn't improved the performance in the slightest over the Lenz LE110 that was removed. I guess this is as good as it gets....