Hornby DCC Announcement

"Scruff" wrote

Thank you - but you'd think they'd tell their dealers wouldn't you?

John.

Absolutely the right thing to do. However, has there been any indication of price differential between the DCC fitted models and the DCC ready ones?

Interesting news on the new decoder, too.

I'm not being facetious but look what certain dealers did with the info they were given about the 2007 new product list.

Some dealers tried to use it for their own commercial advantage and therefore stole Hornby's thunder.*

Could this be why Hornby decided to announce this to everyone at the same time?

Some sort of payback, childish I know, might be possible.

Make all dealers suffer because of the few...

Scruff

"Scruff" wrote

Yes but I wouldn't have known about this if you'd not been good enough to point it out - I've got more important things to do during the working day than to go scouring Hornby's website to see what they are planning.

If they don't tell us, then how do we place orders? If we don't place orders then the product isn't available for our customers to buy!

John.

Yes, I thought so too, like the very specific mention of the inclusion of Railcom, which I believe is only available in Lenz Gold decoders at the moment...

Now, I wonder what Hornby have planned for that? :-)

Ian J.

OK, I'll show my ignorance of DCC, what is 'Railcom'?

":Jerry:" wrote

OK, I'll show my ignorance of DCC, what is 'Railcom'?

From a simple google from the Lenz website :

RailCom introduces a whole new generation of capabilities for DCC by providing for the first time the ability of a DCC decoder to communicate information back to the command station. Such information can potentially include such items as advanced acknowledgement, current speed and direction, real-time load, fuel and water used, absolute position reporting and turnout location.

But there is much more to the RailCom concept. Rather than just sending a simple acknowledgement, we can now send a lot of additional information such as the decoders address, current speed and actual load. This allows transmission of much more than just a simple yes/no answer. For example, we can now send a speed packet to the decoder and receive back the actual speed that the locomotive is currently travelling. This allows the command station to display the actual speed the locomotive is travelling rather than using an artificial speed step. RailCom also allows the command station to understand the load that the train is pulling and allows it to adjust the operation accordingly. The end result is a much more realistic control at the handheld, as for the first time the locomotive engineer will be able to get the experience of operating a real train.

I didn't know either, hence why I looked it up.... Hmmmm. What are they thinking ??

You can subscribe to their RSS feed. That way IE (and presumably others) will check automatically once per day if theres any new announcements and save you the effort. A number of sites are providing this - Rails, Bachmann, Branchlines ..... I've been an avid user for 10 minutes now !

Cheers, Simon

Now if we get it to say where it is eg "Just run over those dodgy points and am approaching the rubbish tunnel you added last week". I'll be well impressed !

Cheers, Simon

Or "Help! I'm about to hit the cat"

Adrian

John. I don't see your problem. They've announced it through official channels - it's on MREmag ;-)

Adrian

thats where computer control comes in to automatically increase power - ok or blow whistle.

Simon

messagenews: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net...

What Lenz are trying to foist in the NMRA as the Recommended Practice for bidirectional communications, i.e. transmission from the decoder back to the command station.

At the moment it is virtually useless as all you can do is display a passing locos ID on a 7-segment LED display. There's no integration with the Lenz feedback bus or XpressNet so you can't do anything useful with.

MBQ

"Adrian B" wrote

Exactly.

John.