??? Using EMC with Encoder feed back

I have been working on a mill that is running EMC. It is a stepper
motor cnc mill, with liner encoders and a DRO Board. I have the mill
running quite well in freqmod.o. When I change it to smdromod.o I can
not get the Z axis to work. EMC is not seeing the encoder from the Z
axis. The way that I know this is that I have turned the motor driver
off and then with EMC up and running, I have turned the axis by hand,
and the Z axis numbers on EMC are not changing at all. When I do the
same thing with the X and Y axis the numbers move up and down as the
axis is turned. I have been unable to find any information about this.
I am using a four axis DRO Board and right now I have EMC showing
three axis's should I change EMC to show four axis? Or are there
setting with end a EMC
con fig file some place that needs to be fixed? Or is there something
else that needs to be done?
Thank you
Terry Twombly