While the Fleet Lighter is designed specifically for lighting passenger cars, cabooses, and other cars, it can be used for any purpose that requires two functions.

The Fleet Lighter has two 200mA functions - enough for a passenger or other car, but few enough to keep it as low-cost as possible. Both functions have a variety of special lighting effects (listed below). Light functions also work when on DC power. This means your lighted passenger cars will have their lights on if you take them to a DC analog layout to run, and will stay on if you have implemented a DC braking section on your DCC layout.

Fleet Lighter functions are fully remappable from Function 0 through Function 12 in order to make them as versatile as possible. For example, if you need two more lighting functions to work with your existing locomotive decoder, you can program those two extra functions to be any function numbers you want - two that won't be the same as your existing decoder. Or, you could program several Fleet Lighters with the same address, but all with different function numbers. This way you can put a decoder in each of your lighted passenger cars, and control the lighting of up to 13 cars with just one address. Further, they can be mapped so one function button controls all functions, or four buttons can each operate one function.

The Fleet Lighter utilizes a smaller version of the JST harness connector. It looks and works like the standard JST connector on many HO-scale decoders, but it has a different number of pins and is not interchangeable. The wire harness come with 7" long wires. All of the wire colors match the same NMRA standard as all other decoders except for the gray wire. On this decoder it is common ground instead of motor negative. A small capacitor can be connected to the function wires to help with lighting flicker. Although it is provided, TCS recommends that it not be used because having too many capacitors of too large a capacitance can cause your system to see the draw from all the capacitors as a short circuit when first powering up. However, if used in moderation, it can be helpful.

To go along with the idea of supplementing existing decoders, the Fleet Lighter has a "Programming Lock" feature. This allows you to lock the decoder so it can't be programmed until unlocked, which provides three purposes: 1) it allows you to program the other decoder without having to disconnect the Fleet Lighter, 2) it prevents you from accidentally reprogramming it ­ you specifically have to unlock it before programming, and 3) some of the layout quirks that have caused decoders to loose their programming will be thwarted - it can't be re-programmed unless first unlocked.

The Fleet Lighter supports 2- and 4-digit addressing under any speed step control, and advanced consisting. It also supports CV Reset, OPS-Mode Programming, and all forms of Service-Mode (programming track) programming.