Hi Troops,
I’m going to put together a Revo Super Receiver package together for a friend for track power use. I’ve done this for our club layout, but my friend says that he has the old Aristo Ultima ART-5460 power supply that he wants to use for a power supply. Is this OK to use with a Revo?
The Ultima is the battery charger looking power supply from Aristo a long time ago, 18 volts, 10 amps I think.
sure, no problem.
If you put a lot of load on the receiver (lots of locos), it’s voltage will sag, since it is an unregulated supply.
Greg
Thank you Greg,
It will be for a single main line track power. He told me that a puff of smoke came out of his Ultima a while back but it kept working with his TE. I have one that I haven’t used for a while and I’ll give it to him. Mine might be old enough to smoke too, LOL!!!
I was concerned about it being not regulated and if it puts out excessively “dirty” DC.
Bob MacGregor said:
and if it puts out excessively “dirty” DC.
I personally think it does however I’m not gonna argue it. I do agree that it will work though.
It’s poor quality DC, but the Revolution does indeed rectify it, and filter it a bit.
The “dirty” part is no filtering, but it’s not “dirty” in a way to upset the Revo receiver.
Greg
THe smoke is probably the rectifier in the ultima. Bring it to the next meet that I am at and I can try to repair the bad one.
The Ultima is a simple supply, transformer, rectifier, and large filter cap, curent meter and switch.
Only thing not easily replaced is the transformer, rest are common parts.
I should have said, a little filtering, not no filtering, and Dan is correct there is a filter cap.
I forgot, is this a center tapped transformer setup? Wait, it is, from George Schreyer’s site:
I think if you “smoked” one of the rectifiers, your TE would be affected, you would only have 1/2 wave DC… my guess is the smoke came from something else, like the resistor or one of the caps going south.
But it would be a good idea to let Dan take a look at it.
Dan, did these things have selenium or silicon rectifiers?
Greg
He is still using it with his TE, not sure what smoked, could have been a little dust or something more!!
I didn’t bother to ask him to check the output voltage as he is not an electrical person by any means!!!
If his Ultima had some dust in it, that means that mine has a gravel pit in it!!! LOL I’ll have to check it out before powering it up.
I no longer have a O scope, so I can’t check what the DC output looks like.
I would prefer that he had an Aristo tri voltage, dual voltage or a 5 amp unit, however all of which are becoming difficult to find.
He has some engines with Revo receivers installed and setup for track power, so controlling the track power with a Revo is a useful and functional upgrade, I think anyway!!!
Greg, it is the selinium rectifier and is a large plate. I replaced mine with silicon. A little more voltage output now.
I use this on my r1 curve layouts as high voltage is not needed.
So, my experience with selenium rectifiers is you can smoke them a bit sometimes and they still “work”, but I would change mine out immediately for silicon ones if I had one of these.
Really is just a relabeled battery charger, although I think the battery charger version did not have the filter caps.
Greg